Paper 2021/1137

qTESLA: Practical Implementations of a Quantum Attack Resistant Signature Scheme

Michael Burger and Juliane Krämer and Christian Bischof

Abstract

Due to the advent of quantum computers, the security of existing public-key cryptography is threatened since quantum computers are expected to be able to solve the underlying mathematical problems efficiently. Hence, quantum resistant alternatives are required. Consequently, about 70 post-quantum scheme candidates were submitted to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standardization effort. One candidate is the qTESLA signature scheme. We present an efficient shared-memory parallelization of qTESLA’s core routines, analyze the speedup in-depth and show that it can compete with the two most commonly used signature schemes RSA and ECDSA which are quantum-vulnerable. The speed is further increased by semi-automatic tuning of qTESLA’s configuration parameters based on results of multi-parameter performance models. We show how to considerably increase qTESLA’s usability through the Java Native Interface (JNI) without performance penalty. The analysis on x86 and ARM architecture employing three operating systems demonstrates the achieved portability. The enhanced performance, its straight forward usability and the high portability of our implementation make it a quantum-safe replacement for the state-of-the-art schemes.