Classic McEliece Hardware Implementation with Enhanced Side-Channel and Fault Resistance

In this work, we propose the first hardware implementation of Classic McEliece protected with countermeasures against Side-Channel Attacks (SCA) and Fault Injection Attacks (FIA). Classic Mceliece is one of the leading candidates for Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) in the ongoing round 4 of the NIST standardization process for post-quantum cryptography. In particular, we implement a range of generic countermeasures against SCA and FIA, particularly protected the vulnerable operations such as additive FFT and Gaussian elimination, that have been targeted by prior SCA and FIA attacks. We also perform a detailed SCA evaluation demonstrating no leakage even with 120k traces (improvement of more than 12x the number of traces compared to unprotected implementation). This comes at a modest performance overhead of between 20% to 80%, depending on the type of implemented SCA countermeasure. Furthermore, we present a thorough ASIC benchmark for SCA and FIA protected Classic McEliece design.