Complete and Improved FPGA Implementation of Classic McEliece

Po-Jen Chen; Tung Chou; Sanjay Deshpande; Norman Lahr; Ruben Niederhagen; Jakub Szefer; Wen Wang

Paper 2022/412

Complete and Improved FPGA Implementation of Classic McEliece

Po-Jen Chen

Tung Chou

Sanjay Deshpande

Norman Lahr

Ruben Niederhagen

Jakub Szefer

Wen Wang

Abstract

We present the first specification-compliant constant-time FPGA implementation of the Classic McEliece cryptosystem from the third-round of NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization process. In particular, we present the first complete implementation including encapsulation and decapsulation modules as well as key generation with seed expansion. All the hardware modules are parametrizable, at compile time, with security level and performance parameters. As the most time consuming operation of Classic McEliece is the systemization of the public key matrix during key generation, we present and evaluate three new algorithms that can be used for systemization while complying with the specification: hybrid early-abort systemizer (HEA), single-pass early-abort systemizer (SPEA), and dual-pass early-abort systemizer (DPEA). All of the designs outperform the prior systemizer designs for Classic McEliece by 2.2x to 2.6x in average runtime and by 1.7x to 2.4x in time-area efficiency. We show that our complete Classic McEliece design for example can perform key generation in 5.2-20ms, encapsulation in 0.1-0.5ms, and decapsulation in 0.7-1.5ms for all security levels on an Xlilinx Artix 7 FPGA. The performance can be increased even further at the cost of resources by increasing the level of parallelization using the performance parameters of our design.

Note: Fixing of errata in TCHES version.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: A minor revision of an IACR publication in TCHES 2022
DOI: 10.46586/tches.v2022.i3.71-113
Keywords: Classic McEliece Encapsulation Mechanism Code-Based Cryptography PQC FPGA Hardware Implementation
Contact author(s): ruben @ polycephaly org
History: 2022-09-05: last of 2 revisions; 2022-03-31: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2022/412
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/412,
      author = {Po-Jen Chen and Tung Chou and Sanjay Deshpande and Norman Lahr and Ruben Niederhagen and Jakub Szefer and Wen Wang},
      title = {Complete and Improved {FPGA} Implementation of Classic {McEliece}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/412},
      year = {2022},
      doi = {10.46586/tches.v2022.i3.71-113},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/412}
}