Paper 2020/1303

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

Joppe W. Bos and Joost Renes and Christine van Vredendaal

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 provide a detailed implementation analysis which highlights the potential of the Kronecker+ technique for commonly available multiplier lengths on contemporary co-processors. We validate this approach with an implementation of the algorithm running on an ARM Cortex-M4 core: the recommended embedded target platform by NIST.