A practicable timing attack against HQC and its countermeasure
Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, Slim Bettaieb, Loïc Bidoux, Philippe Gaborit, Etienne Marcatel · Advances in Mathematics of Communications · 2020
In this paper, we present a practicable chosen ciphertext timing attack retrieving the secret key of HQC. The attack exploits a correlation between the weight of the error to be decoded and the running time of the decoding algorithm of BCH codes. For the 128-bit security parameters of HQC, the attack runs in less than a minute on a desktop computer using roughly 6000 decoding requests and has a success probability of approximately 93 percent. To prevent this attack, we provide an implementation of a constant time algorithm for the decoding of BCH codes. Our implementation of the countermeasure achieves a constant time execution of the decoding process without a significant performance penalty.