MathSciDoc: An Archive for Mathematician ∫

Key exchange protocols from the learning with errors (LWE) problem share many similarities with the Diffie–Hellman–Merkle (DHM) protocol, which plays a central role in securing our Internet. Therefore, there has been a long time effort in designing authenticated key exchange directly from LWE to mirror the advantages of DHM-based protocols. In this paper, we revisit signal leakage attacks and show that the severity of these attacks against LWE-based (authenticated) key exchange is still underestimated. In particular, by converting the problem of launching a signal leakage attack into a coding problem, we can significantly reduce the needed number of queries to reveal the secret key. Specifically, for DXL-KE we reduce the queries from 1,266 to only 29, while for DBS-KE, we need only 748 queries, a great improvement over the previous 1,074,434 queries. Moreover, our new view of signals as binary codes enables recognizing vulnerable schemes more easily. As such we completely recover the secret key of a password-based authenticated key exchange scheme by Dabra et al. with only 757 queries and partially reveal the secret used in a two-factor authentication by Wang et al. with only one query. The experimental evaluation supports our theoretical analysis and demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of our attacks. Our results caution against underestimating the power of signal leakage attacks as they are applicable even in settings with a very restricted number of interactions between adversary and victim.

Recently Chen and Gao~\cite{ChenGao2017} proposed a new quantum algorithm for Boolean polynomial system solving, motivated by the cryptanalysis of some post-quantum cryptosystems. The key idea of their approach is to apply a Quantum Linear System (QLS) algorithm to a Macaulay linear system over $\CC$, which is derived from the Boolean polynomial system. The efficiency of their algorithm depends on the condition number of the Macaulay matrix. In this paper, we give a strong lower bound on the condition number as a function of the Hamming weight of the Boolean solution, and show that in many (if not all) cases a Grover-based exhaustive search algorithm outperforms their algorithm. Then, we improve upon Chen and Gao's algorithm by introducing the Boolean Macaulay linear system over $\CC$ by reducing the original Macaulay linear system. This improved algorithm could potentially significantly outperform the brute-force algorithm, when the Hamming weight of the solution is logarithmic in the number of Boolean variables. Furthermore, we provide a simple and more elementary proof of correctness for our improved algorithm using a reduction employing the Valiant-Vazirani affine hashing method, and also extend the result to polynomial systems over $\FF_q$ improving on subsequent work by Chen, Gao and Yuan \cite{ChenGao2018}. We also suggest a new approach for extracting the solution of the Boolean polynomial system via a generalization of the quantum coupon collector problem \cite{arunachalam2020QuantumCouponCollector}.