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To provide safe communication across an unprotected medium such as the internet, network protocols are being established. These protocols employ public key techniques to perform key exchange and authentication. Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a widely used network protocol that enables secure communication between a server and a client. TLS is employed in billions of transactions per second. Contemporary protocols depend on traditional methods that utilize the computational complexity of factorization or (elliptic curve) logarithm mathematics problems. The ongoing advancement in the processing power of classical computers requires an ongoing increase in the security level of the underlying cryptographic algorithms. This study focuses on the analysis of Curve448 and Edwards curve Ed448, renowned for their superior security features that offer a 224-bit level of security as part of the TLSv1.3 protocol. The exponential advancement of quantum computers, however, presents a substantial threat to secure network communication that depends on classical crypto schemes, irrespective of their degree of security. Quantum computers have the capability to resolve these challenges within a feasible timeframe. In order to successfully transition to Post-Quantum secure network protocols, it is imperative to concurrently deploy both classical and post-quantum algorithms. This is done to fulfill the requirements of both enterprises and governments, while also instilling more assurance in the reliability of the post-quantum systems. This paper presents a detailed hybrid implementation architecture of the TLSv1.3 network protocol. We showcase the first deployment of Curve448 and Crystals-Kyber for the purpose of key exchanging, and Ed448 and Crystals-Dilithium for verifying the authenticity of entities and for X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). We rely upon the widely used OpenSSL library and the specific wolfSSL library for embedded devices to provide our results for server and client applications. 

Hardware security is an emerging field with far-ranging impacts on the design and implementation of the devices we use in our everyday lives – from wearable and implantable medical devices to personal mobile devices, and even cloud devices powering the software services that drive our society forward. Practical, hands-on experience is vital to the training of students in this and other security-related fields. We are developing a new model for hardware security education using readily available, cost-efficient, off-the-shelf development boards, with hands-on experiments that offer new learning opportunities for students. Beyond this, we are experimenting with different pedagogical methods to improve student engagement. In particular, we aim to gamify a subset of the experiments and evaluate the impact on student engagement and learning. This work-in-progress paper describes our initial approach to the gamification of hardware security labs and reports on baseline results from our control study using a more traditional, non-gamified approach. 

The compact key sizes and the low computational latency of the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) family of curves sparked high interest in their integration into network protocols. The recently suggested Curve448, assuring 224-bit security, is an ideal curve choice for integrating into cryptographic libraries according to a late study on backdoors on other ECC instances compromising their security, which results in the integration of Curve448 into the TLS1.3 protocol. Curve448 and its birationally equivalent untwisted Edwards curve Ed448, used for key exchange and authentication, respectively, present a perfect fit for low-end embedded cryptographic libraries due to their minimal memory requirements. In this work, we deploy optimized Montgomery Ladder point multiplication into the widely employed IoT-focused cryptographic library wolfSSL and present side-channel robust and efficient ECDH and EdDSA based on Curve448 and Ed448. We evaluate the performance of the newly integrated architectures against the NIST recommended CortexM4 STM32F407-DK ARM-based platform. We perform thorough side-channel evaluation of the proposed Montgomery Ladder implementation via powerful TVLA analysis revealing DPA data leakage. We integrate countermeasures to protect our design, evaluate their effectiveness and analyze the latency overhead. We achieve SCA robust Curve448 and Ed448 at the cost of around 1.2MCC(1.36× the execution time). Finally, we report the performance of our fully SCA protected Curve448 and Ed448 as part of TLS1.3 wolfSSL, reporting 1.04× performance compared to the original wolfSSL code. 

As the cryptographic community turns its focus toward post-quantum cryptography, the demand for classical cryptographic schemes such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) remains high. In this work, we present an optimized implementation of the Edwards Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) operations Keygen, Sign, and Verify using the Ed25519 parameter on the ARM Cortex-M4 using optimized assembly code. We discuss the optimization of field and group arithmetic to produce high-throughput cryptographic primitives. Then, we present the first SCA-resistant implementation of the Signed Comb method, and Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA) measurements. Our fastest implementation performs Ed25519 Keygen in 200,000 cycles, Sign in 240,000 cycles, and Verify in 720,000 cycles on the ARM Cortex-M4. 

The demand for classical cryptography schemes continues to increase due to the exhaustive studies on their security. Thus, constant improvement of timing, power consumption, and memory requirements are needed for the most widely used classical Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) primitives, suiting high- as well as low-end devices. In this work, we present the first implementation of the Edwards Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) based on the Ed448 targeting the ARM Cortex-M4-based STM32F407VG microcontroller, which forms a large part of the Internet of Things (IoT) world. We report timing and memory consumption results based on portable C and targetspecific hand-crafted assembly code implementations of the lowlevel finite filed arithmetics. We optimize the high-level group operations by implementing the efficient scalar multiplication over the Ed448 isogenous map to reduce the computation complexity. Furthermore, we provide a side-channel analysis (SCA) and fault attack protected design by developing point randomization, scalar blinding techniques, and repeated signature, and evaluate the performance. Our optimized architecture performs a signature and verification in 39.88ms and 51.54ms, respectively, where SCA protection can be achieved at less than 6.4% cost of performance overhead. 

Practical, hands-on experience is an essential component of computer science and engineering education, especially in the cybersecurity domain. In this project, we are investigating techniques for improving student learning in such courses, first by developing a new hands-on hardware security course, then by testing the impact of gamification on student learning. The experiments utilize only inexpensive, open-source or freely-available software and hardware, and upon project completion, the modules themselves will also be made freely available online. Improving student learning in this critical area can have a wide-spread positive societal impact as we encourage students to have a security-first, secure-by-design mindset. 

Providing error detection constructions for Internet of nano-Things in constrained applications is of prominent importance. The Niederreiter cryptosystem falls into the category of code-based public-key cryptography. It is a relatively well-established scheme, but its key size and performance overheads have traditionally hindered its efficiency to be utilized for traditional computers. However, with the arrival of quantum computers, the Niederreiter cryptosystem is believed to be secure against attacks enabled by such computers, even though it has been previously shown that it is still vulnerable to fault injection and natural hardware defects. In this paper, we present fault detection schemes for the different blocks in the key generation of the Niederreiter cryptosystem using binary Goppa codes. These blocks perform finite field operations such as addition, multiplication, squaring, and inversion. The schemes are derived for different parameter sizes in order to have more flexibility and be able to choose according to the overheads to be tolerated and the required level of security. Moreover, we implement our fault detection schemes on Xilinx field-programmable gate array (FPGA) family Kintex UltraScale+ (device xcku5p-ffvd900-1-i) to benchmark the overhead induced of the proposed approaches. 

Abstract—In this article, we provide improvements for the architecture of Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE), a post-quantum cryptography candidate.We develop a new highly optimized Montgomery multiplication algorithm and architecture for prime fields. The multiplier occupies less area and provide better timing results than the state-of-the-art.We also provide improvements to the scheduling of SIKE in our programROM.We implement SIKE for all Round 3 NISTsecurity levels (SIKEp434 for NISTsecurity level 1, SIKEp503 for NIST security level 2, SIKEp610 for NISTsecurity level 3, and SIKEp751 for NISTsecurity level 5) on Xilinx Artix 7 and Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGAs. Our best implementation (NISTsecurity level 1) runs 38 percent faster and occupies 30 percent less hardware resources in comparison to the leading counterpart available in the literature and implementations for other security levels achieved similar improvement.