Paper 2019/787

Optimized implementation of the NIST PQC submission ROLLO on microcontroller

Jérôme Lablanche, Lina Mortajine, Othman Benchaalal, Pierre-Louis Cayrel, and Nadia El Mrabet

Abstract

We present in this paper an efficient implementation of the code-based cryptosystem ROLLO, a candidate to the NIST PQC project, on a device available on the market. This implementation benefits of the existing hardware by using a crypto co-processor contained in an already deployed microcontroller to speed-up operations in $\mathbb{F}_{2^m}$. Optimizations are then made on operations in $\mathbb{F}_{2^m}^n$. Finally, the cryptosystem outperforms the public key exchange protocol ECDH for a security level of 192 bits showing then the possibility of the integration of this new cryptosystem in current chips. According to our implementation, the ROLLO-I-128 submission takes 173,6 ms for key generation, 12 ms for encapsulation and 79.4 ms for decapsulation on a microcontroller featuring $\text{ARM}^{\text{\textregistered}}$ $\text{SecurCore}^{\text{\textregistered}}$ SC300\texttrademark core running at 50 MHz.

Note: - Grammar and syntax correction - Modification of tables in the last section