Bitstream Fault Injection Attacks on CRYSTALS Kyber Implementations on FPGAs
Ziying Ni, Ayesha Khalid, Weiqiang Liu, Maire P. O'Neill · 2024
CRYSTALS-Kyber is the only Public-key Encryption (PKE)/ Key-encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) scheme that was chosen for standardization by the National Institute of Standards and Technology initiated Post-quantum Cryptography competition (so called NIST PQC). In this paper, we show the first successfully malicious modifications of the bitstream of a Kyber FPGA implementation. We successfully demonstrate 4 different attacks on Kyber hardware implementations on Artix-7 FPGAs that either reduce the complexity of polynomial multiplication operations or enable direct secret key/ message recovery by: disabling BRAMs, disabling DSPs, zeroing NTT ROM and tampering with CBD2 results. Two of our attacks are generic in nature and the other two require reverse-engineering or a detailed knowledge of the design. We evaluate the feasibility of the four attacks, among which the zeroing NTT ROM and tampering with the CBD2 result attacks produce higher public key and ciphertext complexity and thus are difficult to be detected. Two countermeasures are proposed to prevent the attacks proposed in this paper.