Cold boot attacks on the supersingular isogeny key encapsulation (Sike) mechanism

Abstract

This research paper evaluates the feasibility of cold boot attacks on the Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) mechanism. This key encapsulation mechanism has been included in the list of alternate candidates of the third round of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this scheme is assessed in the cold boot attacks setting. In particular, our evaluation is focused on the reference implementation of this scheme. Furthermore, we present a dedicated key-recovery algorithm for SIKE in this setting and show that the key recovery algorithm works for all the parameter sets recommended for this scheme. Moreover, we compute the success rates of our key recovery algorithm through simulations and show the key recovery algorithm may reconstruct the SIKE secret key for any SIKE parameters for a fixed and small α = 0.001 (the probability of a 0 to 1 bit-flipping) and varying values for β (the probability of a 1 to 0 bit-flipping) in the set {0.001, 0.01, …, 0.1}. Additionally, we show how to integrate a quantum key enumeration algorithm with our key-recovery algorithm to improve its overall performance.