DRANKULA: a McEliece-like rank metric based cryptosystem implementation

Ameera Salem Al Abdouli; Mohamed Al Ali; Emanuele Bellini; Florian Caullery; Alexandros Hasikos; Marc Manzano; Victor Mateu

Paper 2018/768

DRANKULA: a McEliece-like rank metric based cryptosystem implementation

Ameera Salem Al Abdouli, Mohamed Al Ali, Emanuele Bellini, Florian Caullery, Alexandros Hasikos, Marc Manzano, and Victor Mateu

Abstract

We present and analyze the performance of DRANKULA, a McEliece-like cryptosystem implementation using \textit{rank metric} instead of Hamming distance. Namely, we use the scheme proposed by Loidreau in PQCrypto 2017 using Gabidulin codes. We propose a set of carefully selected parameters and we address several non-trivial issues when porting this scheme into real-world systems as, for example, the generation of errors of a given rank. We provide the pseudo-code of the core algorithms of the cryptosystem. In addition, we also show code optimization when special instructions like Carry-less multiplications are available. Moreover, we argue how to have a practical and side-channel resistant version of the cryptosystem. We integrated the scheme in Open Quantum Safe and benchmarked it against the other schemes implemented there. Our results show that DRANKULA can be a practical alternative to other well-known quantum-safe schemes.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Published elsewhere. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE 2018), Volume 2: SECRYPT, pages 64-75
Keywords: Code-based cryptography Public key cryptography Cryptosystem Software Implementation Post-quantum cryptography
Contact author(s): manzanomarc @ gmail com
History: 2018-08-27: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2018/768
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/768,
      author = {Ameera Salem Al Abdouli and Mohamed Al Ali and Emanuele Bellini and Florian Caullery and Alexandros Hasikos and Marc Manzano and Victor Mateu},
      title = {{DRANKULA}: a {McEliece}-like rank metric based cryptosystem implementation},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/768},
      year = {2018},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/768}
}