Cascade error correction attack; exploiting implicit and side channel information leakage

This work presents a complete mathematical model of a novel cryptanalytic attack that combines the Cascade error correction leakages with the side channel information leakage to construct a more powerful attack than either of these two launched alone. We find that a higher Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) leaves Cascade more vulnerable to reliable information being extracted from side channel leakage and as such, reliable complete key recovery. For a key length of 1024bits and QBER of 0.2, on any device where the ratio between the difference of noiseless power consumption levels of an XOR function outputting 0 or 1, and power consumption noise, is greater than 1.7, a full key recovery is expected. For lower QBER, we see that for the ratio of the difference of noiseless power consumption and power consumption noise must higher in order to successfully recover the key.