Meet a New Cybersecurity Threat … Frequency Scaling
And so, the darling of the post-quantum cryptography world … isogenies … is facing a new threat. It involves the SIKE (Supersingular Isogeny Key Exchange) key exchange method, and which has been attacked through the dynamic frequency scaling of x86 processors — known as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). The threat was discovered by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Washington, and will be presented at the 31st USENIX Security Symposium in Boston [1]:
It relates to timing-related attacks and which normally involves discovering one or more bits of a key by measuring the time it takes to perform a given task.
Timing attack
A classical timing attack is with the square and multiply method, and where we use an exponential cipher of M^e (such as in RSA), and a ‘1’ in an encryption key, will cause extra computation, as opposed to a ‘0’. This allows an adversary the opportunity to observe how long it takes to perform the encryption operations. In the following case, we see that the SM (Square and Multiply) method takes longer than the S (Square…
