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QC-MDPC Decoders with Several Shades of Gray

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Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQCrypto 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12100))

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Abstract

QC-MDPC code-based KEMs rely on decoders that have a small or even negligible Decoding Failure Rate (DFR). These decoders should be efficient and implementable in constant-time. One example for a QC-MDPC KEM is the Round-2 candidate of the NIST PQC standardization project, “BIKE”. We have recently shown that the Black-Gray decoder achieves the required properties. In this paper, we define several new variants of the Black-Gray decoder. One of them, called Black-Gray-Flip, needs only 7 steps to achieve a smaller DFR than Black-Gray with 9 steps, for the same block size. On current platforms, our BIKE-1 (Level-1) constant-time decapsulation is \(1.9\times \) faster than the previous decapsulation with Black-Gray. We also report an additional \(1.25\times \) decapsulating speedup using the new and instructions available on “Ice-Lake” micro-architecture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The paper [13] does not point to publicly available code.

References

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Acknowledgments

We thank Ray Perlner from NIST for pointing out that the mock-bits technique is not sufficient for security when using static keys, which drove us to change our BIKE implementation. This research was partly supported by: The Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 3380/19); The BIU Center for Research in Applied Cryptography and Cyber Security, and the Center for Cyber Law and Policy at the University of Haifa, both in conjunction with the Israel National Cyber Bureau in the Prime Minister’s Office.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Nir Drucker & Shay Gueron

  2. Amazon, Seattle, USA

    Nir Drucker & Shay Gueron

  3. EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Dusan Kostic

Authors
  1. Nir Drucker
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  2. Shay Gueron
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  3. Dusan Kostic
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nir Drucker .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Jintai Ding

  2. Inria, Paris, France

    Jean-Pierre Tillich

Appendices

A Pseudo-Code for B, BG, BGB, BGF

A description of the B, BG, BGB, BGF decoders is given in Sect. 4. Algorithm 3 provides a formal definition of them.

figure bb
Table 6. The best linear and the two points extrapolation equations, and the estimated r values for three target DFRs. Level is abbreviated to Lvl, the number of iterations is abbreviated to iter, linear is abbreviated to lin., equation is abbreviated to eq. The Lin. start column indicates the index of the first value of r where the linear fit starts. The 5 column (number of steps) is the indication for the overall performance of the decoder (lower is better).
Full size table

B Additional Information on the Experiments and Results

The following values of r were used by the best linear fit extrapolation method:

  • BIKE-1 Level-1: 9349, 9547, 9749, 9803, 9859, 9883, 9901, 9907, 9923, 9941, 9949, 10037, 10067, 10069, 10091, 10093, 10099, 10133, 10139.

For Level-1 studies the number of tests for every value of r is 3.84M for \(r \in [9349, 9901]\) and 384M for (larger) \(r \in [9907, 10139]\). For the line through two large points extrapolation method (see [8][Appendix C] and Level-1, we chose: \(r = 10141\) running 384M tests, and \(r = 10259\) running \(\sim {}7.3\) (technically 7.296) billion tests (Table 6).

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Drucker, N., Gueron, S., Kostic, D. (2020). QC-MDPC Decoders with Several Shades of Gray. In: Ding, J., Tillich, JP. (eds) Post-Quantum Cryptography. PQCrypto 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12100. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44223-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44223-1_3

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-44223-1

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