Classic McEliece Implementation with Low Memory Footprint

Johannes Roth; Evangelos Karatsiolis; Juliane Krämer

Paper 2021/138

Classic McEliece Implementation with Low Memory Footprint

Johannes Roth, Evangelos Karatsiolis, and Juliane Krämer

Abstract

The Classic McEliece cryptosystem is one of the most trusted quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes. Deploying it in practical applications, however, is challenging due to the size of its public key. In this work, we bridge this gap. We present an implementation of Classic McEliece on an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, optimized to overcome memory constraints. To this end, we present an algorithm to retrieve the public key ad-hoc. This reduces memory and storage requirements and enables the generation of larger key pairs on the device. To further improve the implementation, we perform the public key operation by streaming the key to avoid storing it as a whole. This additionally reduces the risk of denial of service attacks. Finally, we use these results to implement and run TLS on the embedded device.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Published elsewhere. CARDIS 2020: Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-68487-7_3
Keywords: Post-Quantum Cryptography Code-Based Cryptography Classic McEliece Low Memory Footprint Embedded Implementation TLS ARM Cortex-M4
Contact author(s): jroth @ mtg de
ekaratsiolis @ mtg de
juliane @ qpc tu-darmstadt de
History: 2021-02-10: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/138
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/138,
      author = {Johannes Roth and Evangelos Karatsiolis and Juliane Krämer},
      title = {Classic {McEliece} Implementation with Low Memory Footprint},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/138},
      year = {2021},
      doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-68487-7_3},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/138}
}