Paper 2025/319
Single Trace Side-Channel Vulnerabilities Discovery Using Statistical Leakage Simulator
, North Carolina State UniversityAbstract
This paper presents a novel single-trace side-channel attack on FALCON—a lattice-based post-quantum digital signature protocol recently approved for standardization by NIST. We target the discrete Gaussian sampling operation within the FALCON key generation scheme and use a single power measurement trace to succeed. Notably, negating the ‘shift right 63-bit’ operation (for 64-bit values) leaks critical information about the ‘-1’ vs. ‘0’ assignments to intermediate coefficients. These leaks enable full recovery of the generated secret keys. The proposed attack is simulated on the ELMO simulator running both reference and optimized software implementation from FALCON’s NIST Round 3 package. Statistical analysis with 20k tests reveals a full key-recovery success rate of 100% for FALCON-512. This work highlights the vulnerability of current software solutions to single-trace attacks and underscores the urgent need to develop single-trace resilient software for embedded systems in the presilicon phase.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Attacks and cryptanalysis
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- Keywords
- Side-Channal AttackFALCONpost-quantum CryptographyELMO
- Contact author(s)
- jqiu2 @ ncsu edu
- History
- 2025-02-24: approved
- 2025-02-21: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2025/319
- License
-
CC BY-NC-ND
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/319,
author = {Jinyi Qiu},
title = {Single Trace Side-Channel Vulnerabilities Discovery Using Statistical Leakage Simulator},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/319},
year = {2025},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/319}
}
