An Improved Two-Step Attack on Lattice-Based Cryptography: A Case Study of Kyber

After three rounds of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) strict evaluations conducted by NIST, CRYSTALS-Kyber was successfully selected in July 2022 and standardized in August 2024. It becomes urgent to further evaluate Kyber’s physical security for the upcoming deployment phase. In this brief, we present an improved two-step attack on Kyber to quickly recover the full secret key, s, by using much fewer power traces and less time. In the first step, we use the correlation power analysis (CPA) to obtain a portion of guess values of s with a small number of power traces. The CPA is enhanced by utilizing both Pearson and Kendall’s rank correlation coefficients and modifying the leakage model to improve the accuracy. In the second step, we adopt the lattice attack to recover s based on the results of CPA. The success rate is largely built up by constructing a trial-and-error method. We deploy the reference implementations of Kyber-512, -768, and -1024 on an ARM Cortex-M4 target board and successfully recover s in approximately <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$9\sim 10$ </tex-math></inline-formula> min with at most 15 power traces, using a Xeon Gold 6342-equipped machine for the attack.