Practical Randomized RLWE-Based Key Exchange Against Signal Leakage Attack

Abstract

Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE)-based key exchange is one of the most efficient and secure primitive for post-quantum cryptography. One common approach to achieve key exchange over RLWE is error reconciliation. Recently, an efficient attack against reconciliation-based RLWE key exchange protocols with reused keys was proposed. This attack can recover a long-term private key if a key pair is reused. We also know that in the real world, key reuse is commonly adopted in applications like the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol to improve performance. Directly motivated by this attack, we construct a new randomized RLWE-based key exchange protocol against this attack. Our lightweight approach incorporates an additional ephemeral public error term into key exchange materials, so that this attack no longer works. With the same attack, we practically show that the signal value of our protocol is indistinguishable from uniform random, therefore, this attack no longer works. We explain how the attack fails, present 200-bit classic and 80-bit quantum secure parameter choice, efficient implementations, comparisons and discussion. Benchmark shows our protocol is truly efficient and even faster than related vulnerable protocols.