Single Trace Analysis against HyMES by Exploitation of Joint Distributions of Leakages
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper proposed a side-channel analysis on HyMES using the joint distributions of leakeages. By analyzing the leakage that occurs while calculating the parity-check matrix, the authors recovered the Goppa polynomial g(z) and the support Lsec, which are the secret keys of HyMES. The proposed method only uses one power consumption trace, and it is the first joint distribution based analysis for public-key cryptography. Their experimental result shows that their attack is efficient, by using simulated power traces. The simulated traces were collected by adding noise to the Hamming weight model.
I have no major comment on the paper, except on the following minor matters:
1. I think there should be a space before each citation (I am not sure what’s MDPI policy on this). For example, Pg 1 Line 20: … making the RSA and ECC insecure[1]. I think it should be … making the RSA and ECC insecure [1].
2. Pg 2 Line 31-33: Additionally, code-based cryptosystems … standardization project.
Can you provide appropriate citation for this statement?
3. Pg 2 Line 35: The McEliece was the first cryptographic scheme … encryption process.
I do not think that this statement is correct.
4. Pg 2 Line 61-62: two “only” appeared. Please change it to “... has only been investigated in the …”
5. Pg 3 Line 86: Change the statement to “we introduce the basic concepts in code-based cryptography and structures of HyMEWS.”
6. Pg 3 Def 1: “for” à “For”
7. Pg 4 Line 118: Although the algorithm states that any error-correcting codes can be used, only McEliece with Goppa codes has resisted cryptanalysis to date.
This statement may not be correct. Do you have any citation/explanation?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.doc
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is a valuable work on proposing a side-channel attack against HyMES. The attack technique and the results have presented clearly. I just spotted the following small errors in the paper that need to be edited before publishing the paper.
- Page 2, line 62: one of the "only"s shall be removed.
- Usually, the present tense is used for presenting the contribution of the paper. So, I suggest to change the tense of the verbs from past to present on page 2, lines 65-78.
- Page 4, line 120: Algorithma should be replaced by algorithms
- Page 4: SGP and HW have been used for describing Algorithm 1 without mentioning what they stand for (or at least I could not find it).
- Page 10, line 215: "the construct" should be "then construct"
All in all, I think it is good that the paper is read by the authors once again to edit the possible typos and grammatical errors.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.doc
