Cryptography and Architectures for Computer Security Project

Introduction

This work describes a masking-based side channel resistent implementation of HQC, a third round alternative candidate for the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography competition.

The implementation on this repository has been tested on an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, showing a significant decrease in terms of leaked information, while still keeping a relatively small overhead.

Contents

This repository contains:

• report: the documentation about the work done, the presentation and the benchmark results
• scripts: python and bash scripts to automate the code generation, testing and analysis processes
• src: C implementation of the cryptosystem

Installation

In order to compile and run HQC, the following softwares are needed: cmake, make, stm32programmer, gcc-arm-none-eabi.

This implementation is tailored for the STM32F401RE board; to change the target, you need to generate the configuration files on STM32CodeMX and add them in the src/stm32 folder.

Compilation

We use CMake to manage all the executables we generate; assuming to be in the build folder:

cmake .. -DSECLVL=X -DMASKLVL=Y -DMODE="MODE" -DCROSSCOMPILE=CROSS -DVERBOSE=VERB

X: security level (128, 192, 256)

Y: number of shares of the masking scheme (1, 2, 3, 4)

MODE: the executable to be compiled (CONST-KEM, CONST-PKE, TIMING-KEM, TIMING-PKE, FUNCTIONAL)

CROSS: 1 to compile for the stm32 board, 0 for the native architecture

VERB: the verbosity level of the log messages (1, 2)