Evaluating Side-Channel Attack Vulnerabilities in Post-Quantum CRYSTALS-Kyber Hardware Based on Simple Power Analysis

CRYSTALS-Kyber is a new algorithm that the NIST recently selected to standardize public-key encryption and key establishment. Therefore, studies are needed to evaluate the side-channel attack resistance of CRYSTALS-Kyber implementations. This paper presents a simple power analysis of a CRYSTALS-Kyber hardware implementation with the security parameter k=3. Since hardware implementations perform computations in parallel, the power consumption of each operation is difficult to quantify. The entire power consumption trace was identified using 6,072,500 samples during the CCAKEM implementation of Kyber. A significant part of the message encoding power consumption occurred during decapsulation. These findings show that existing hardware implementations of CRYSTALS-Kyber require effective countermeasures to efficiently resist side-channel attacks.