Research project BL/01/IN18 (Research action BL)
Quantum computers will make our current public-key cryptography (PKC) obsolete since they can easily break their underlying hard problems. Hence, we need post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms which can replace the classical PKC. Currently, the U.S. government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is running a procedure to standardize PQC. Lattice-based schemes are prevalent in realizing PQC. Interestingly, they also enable Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which allows computation over encrypted data and is often called the “holy grail” of computing. However, the existing algorithms do not take the security against side-channel and fault attacks (or some combination of them) into account. These attack vectors have been shown to be potent threats in several application areas such as automotive, IoT, cloud-based applications, etc. Such attacks are challenging to prevent without incurring prohibitive resource overhead due to the complexity of the algorithms and lack of exploration of different attack surfaces.
The main objective is to increase and strengthen collaboration between the partners through visits, exchanges, joint workshops and tutorials in order to further enhance the knowledge-base and human resource in this area of cryptography. The topic of the collaboration will be analysis of lattice-based PQC and FHE schemes against physical attacks, and providing provable secure countermeasures.
KU Leuven team specializes in PQC design, efficient implementations, and side-channel analysis. IIT Kharagpur team has expertise in designing FHE threshold decryption schemes, FPGA realizations for FHE, and fault attacks. We will take a holistic approach in leveraging the world-class expertise of KU Leuven to design PQC algorithms to realize efficient FHE applications. Further, combining the complementary skill sets of KU Leuven in side-channel analysis and that on fault analysis at IIT Kharagpur allows to develop secure PQC schemes and FHE protocols which resist fault attacks, side-channel attacks, and combined attacks.
National and International Relevance/Novelty: In the near future, PQCs will be present as root-of-trust in almost every device that we use. Most of these devices will be part of nationally/internationally established automotive, IoT standards, and defense infrastructure and can be easily accessed by an adversary, even in an invasive manner. Therefore, the PQC algorithms need to be thoroughly analyzed and protected against side-channel and fault adversaries. The research in this area is still in its infancy, and significant effort is required in this regard. FHE lays the foundation of several applications, like healthcare, e-voting, privacy-preserving ML, etc. Currently FHE needs hardware acceleration for efficiency, along with research in several complementary areas related to PQC. Our intended collaboration is expected to bring together this collective expertise to produce impactful research.
