Rejected Signatures’ Challenges Pose New Challenges: Key Recovery of CRYSTALS-Dilithium via Side-Channel Attacks

Rejection sampling is a crucial security mechanism in lattice-based signature schemes that follow the Fiat-Shamir with aborts paradigm, such as MLDSA/ CRYSTALS-Dilithium. This technique transforms secret-dependent signature samples into ones that are statistically close to a secret-independent distribution (in the random oracle model). While many side-channel attacks have directly targeted sensitive data such as nonces, secret keys, and decomposed commitments, fewer studies have explored the potential leakage associated with rejection sampling. Notably, at HOST 2021, Karabulut et al. showed that leakage from rejected signatures’ challenges can undermine, but not entirely break, the security of the Dilithium scheme.Motivated by the above, we convert the problem of key recovery (from the leakage of rejection sampling) to an integer linear programming problem (ILP), where rejected responses of unique Hamming weights set upper/lower constraints of the product between the challenge and the private key. We formally study the worst-case complexity of the problem as well as empirically confirm the practicality of the rejected signature’s challenge attack. For all three security levels of Dilithium-2/3/5, our attack recovers the private key in seconds or minutes with a 100% Success Rate (SR).Our attack leverages knowledge of the rejected signature’s challenge and response, and thus we propose methods to extract this information by exploiting single-trace sidechannel leakage from Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) operations and functions associated with the response generation procedure. We demonstrate the practicality of this rejected signature’s challenge attack by using real power consumption on an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first practical and efficient side-channel key recovery attack on ML-DSA/Dilithium that targets the rejection sampling procedure. Furthermore, we discuss some countermeasures to mitigate this security issue.