Onsite Talk -
Cache-Timing Attack Against HQC

[About]

QSMC is inviting a cryptography expert to Taiwan for an Onsite Talk for the first time!

For this event, we have invited Dr. Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, who specializes in ‘Side-Channel Attacks.’

Dr. Chuengsatiansup will elaborate on and analyze how software side-channel attacks can impact post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, and how to protect implementations against said attacks.

[Date & Time]

• Date: Dec 21, 2023 (Thur)

• Time: 15:00-16:30 UTC+8

• Location: Center for Public and Business Administration Education, NCCU, No. 187, Jinhua St, Da’an District, Taipei City (The exact meeting room details will be provided via email two days prior to the event.)

[Agenda]

• 15:00~15:10 Quantum Safe Migration Center Introduction

• 15:10~16:10 Cache-Timing Attack Against HQC/ Dr. Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup

• 16:10~16:30 Networking

[Abstract]

HQC (Hamming Quasi-Cyclic) is a code-based post-quantum secure key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) that remains in the fourth round of the ongoing NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization project. In this talk, I will present a chosen-ciphertext cache-timing attack on HQC. 

I will first introduce the concept of cache line indicator that describes timing behavior of the HQC implementation. This concept will be used to construct a cache-timing-based distinguisher to realize a plaintext-checking (PC) oracle. The PC oracle checks if a given ciphertext decrypts to a given message, which forms an essential part for a new full key-recovery attack that exploits the sparsity of the HQC key. To demonstrate the practicality of the proposed method, I will present the results of attacking HQC with Prime+Probe technique on an Intel SGX platform using the SGX-Step framework.

[Speaker]

Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research area covers cryptographic optimization, efficient implementation, and side-channel analysis.

She was among the finalists of the Google Hash Code, the winners of the global competition iDASH Healthcare Privacy Protection Challenge, and the contributors of the lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism NTRU Prime submitted to the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project. As an early-career researcher, she has been awarded competitive research funding such as Google Research Scholar and Defence Innovation Partnership Collaborative Research Fund.

Prior to joining The University of Melbourne, she was a Lecturer at The University of Adelaide, Australia, and a postdoctoral researcher at Inria and ENS de Lyon, France. Before that, she conducted her PhD study at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. She was awarded a prestigious Japanese Government Scholarship (Monbukagakusho) for her master's study and obtained the master's degree in Computer Science from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo. Her undergraduate study was at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, where she received the bachelor's degree of Engineering program in Computer Engineering with first class honors.

[Notice]

• This event is conducted in English.

• The organizer will send you an "Event Notification Letter" two days before the event.

• Contact person: Judy / judy.chen@chelpis.com / +886-2-7750-7057.

 [Registration Closed]