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arXiv · 2601.07634

Simple Power Analysis of Polynomial Multiplication in HQC

Pavel Velek·Tomáš Rabas·Jiří Buček
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Abstract

The Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) cryptosystem was selected for standardization in the fourth round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization project. The goal of the PQC project is to standardize one or more quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we present a single-trace Simple Power Analysis (SPA) attack against HQC that exploits power consumption leakage that occurs during polynomial multiplication performed at the beginning of HQC decryption. Using the ChipWhisperer-Lite board, we perform and evaluate the attack, achieving a 99.69% success rate over 10 000 attack attempts. We also propose various countermeasures against the attack and evaluate their time complexity.

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Pavel Velek, Tomáš Rabas, Jiří Buček. 2026-01-12. Simple Power Analysis of Polynomial Multiplication in HQC. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07634

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