Engineering Commons^™

Reverse Engineering Post-Quantum Cryptography Schemes To Find Rowhammer Exploits, Sam Lefforge

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Post-quantum cryptography is a necessary countermeasure to protect against attacks from quantum computer. However, the post-quantum cryptography schemes are potentially vulnerable to side channel attacks. One such method of attacking involves creating bit-flips in victim memory through a process called Rowhammer. These attacks can vary in nature, but can involve rowhammering bits to raise the encryption scheme's decryption failure rate, or modifying the scheme's random seed. With a high enough decryption failure rate, it becomes feasible to generate sufficient information about the secret key to perform a key recovery attack. This thesis proposed two attacks on proposed post-quantum cryptography algorithms, …