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A Differential Fault Attack Against Deterministic Falcon Signatures

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Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications (CARDIS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14530))

Abstract

We describe a fault attack against the deterministic variant of the \(\textsc {Falcon}\) signature scheme. It is the first fault attack that exploits specific properties of deterministic \(\textsc {Falcon}\). The attack works under a very relaxed and realistic single fault random model. The main idea is to inject a fault into the pseudo-random generator of the pre-image trapdoor sampler, generate different signatures for the same input, find reasonably short lattice vectors this way, and finally use lattice reduction techniques to obtain the private key. We investigate the relationship between fault location, the number of faults, computational effort for a possibly remaining exhaustive search step and success probability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In practice, the coefficients of the polynomials f and g are generated following a discrete Gaussian distribution with center 0 and standard deviation \(\sigma =1.17\sqrt{q/2n}\).

  2. 2.

    commit 02a2a64c44147775e6870b2d957f2cfda1437895.

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  1. Siemens AG, Technology, Munich, Germany

    Sven Bauer & Fabrizio De Santis

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  1. Sven Bauer
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  2. Fabrizio De Santis
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Correspondence to Sven Bauer .

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  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Shivam Bhasin

  2. NinjaLab, Montpellier, France

    Thomas Roche

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Bauer, S., De Santis, F. (2024). A Differential Fault Attack Against Deterministic Falcon Signatures. In: Bhasin, S., Roche, T. (eds) Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications. CARDIS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14530. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54409-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54409-5_3

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