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Title: Engineering Practical Rank-Code-Based Cryptographic Schemes on Embedded Hardware. A Case Study on ROLLO
In this paper, we investigate the practical performance of rank-code based cryptography on FPGA platforms by presenting a case study on the quantum-safe KEM scheme based on LRPC codes called ROLLO, which was among NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization round-2 candidates. Specifically, we present an FPGA implementation of the encapsulation and decapsulation operations of the ROLLO KEM scheme with some variations to the original specification. The design is fully parameterized, using code-generation scripts to support a wide range of parameter choices for security levels specified in ROLLO. At the core of the ROLLO hardware, we presented a generic approach for hardware-based Gaussian elimination, which can process both non-singular and singular matrices. Previous works on hardware-based Gaussian elimination can only process non-singular ones. However, a plethora of cryptosystems, for instance, quantum-safe key encapsulation mechanisms based on rank-metric codes, ROLLO and RQC, which are among NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization round-2 candidates, require performing Gaussian elimination for random matrices regardless of the singularity. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first hardware implementation for rank-code-based cryptographic schemes. The experimental results suggest rank-code-based schemes can be highly efficient.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1801512
NSF-PAR ID:
10438602
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Volume:
72
Issue:
7
ISSN:
0018-9340
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 17
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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