Post-Quantum Cryptography with Contemporary Co-Processors: Beyond Kronecker, Schönhage-Strassen & Nussbaumer

Authors: 

Joppe W. Bos, Joost Renes, and Christine van Vredendaal, NXP Semiconductors

Abstract: 

There are currently over 30 billion IoT (Internet of Things) devices installed worldwide. To secure these devices from various threats one often relies on public-key cryptographic primitives whose operations can be costly to compute on resource-constrained IoT devices. To support such operations these devices often include a dedicated co-processor for cryptographic procedures, typically in the form of a big integer arithmetic unit. Such existing arithmetic co-processors do not offer the functionality that is expected by upcoming post-quantum cryptographic primitives. Regardless, contemporary systems may exist in the field for many years to come.

In this paper we propose the Kronecker+ algorithm for polynomial multiplication in rings of the form Z[X]/(X^n +1): the arithmetic foundation of many lattice-based cryptographic schemes. We discuss how Kronecker+ allows for re-use of existing co-processors for post-quantum cryptography, and in particular directly applies to the various finalists in the post-quantum standardization effort led by NIST. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in practice by integrating Kronecker+ into Saber: one of the finalists in the ongoing NIST standardization effort. On our target platform, a RV32IMC with access to a dedicated arithmetic co-processor designed to accelerate RSA and ECC, Kronecker+ performs the matrix multiplication 2.8 times faster than regular Kronecker substitution and 1.7 times faster than Harvey's negated-evaluation-points method.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {277166,
author = {Joppe W. Bos and Joost Renes and Christine van Vredendaal},
title = {{Post-Quantum} Cryptography with Contemporary {Co-Processors}: Beyond Kronecker, {Sch{\"o}nhage-Strassen} \& Nussbaumer},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {3683--3697},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/bos},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video