Masked Vector Sampling for HQC

Maxime Spyropoulos, David Vigilant, Fabrice Perion, Renaud Pacalet, Laurent Sauvage

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Anticipating the advent of large quantum computers, NIST started a worldwide competition in 2016 aiming to define the next cryptographic standards. HQC is one of these post-quantum schemes selected for standardization. In 2022, Guo et al. introduced a timing attack that exploited a weakness in HQC rejection sampling function to recover its secret key in 866,000 calls to an oracle. The authors of HQC updated its specification by applying an algorithm to sample vectors in constant time. A masked implementation of this function was later proposed for BIKE but it is not directly applicable to HQC. In this paper we propose a specificationcompliant masked version of the HQC vector sampling which relies, to our knowledge, on the first masked implementation of the Barrett reduction.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography, SECRYPT 2025
EditorsSabrina De Capitani Di Vimercati, Pierangela Samarati
PublisherScience and Technology Publications, Lda
Pages750-758
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)9789897587603
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2025
Externally publishedYes
Event22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography, SECRYPT 2025 - Bilbao, Spain
Duration: 11 Jun 202513 Jun 2025

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Conference on Security and Cryptography
Volume1
ISSN (Print)2184-7711

Conference

Conference22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography, SECRYPT 2025
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBilbao
Period11/06/2513/06/25

Keywords

  • HQC
  • Masking
  • Post-Quantum Cryptography
  • Side-Channel Attack

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