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.
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Notes
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This wording avoids calling it generating the public key since the public key is already uniquely defined after the private key is chosen. The term “generate” might be misleading and imply that randomness is introduced into this process.
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While there are other significant, temporary memory-overheads in the Classic McEliece code, none of them is as big as that for S. Furthermore, for the extended private key generation, temporary buffers can often be placed in the buffer where S is written into at the end of the key generation process. This results in a decreased overall memory consumption.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the project “QuantumRISC” (ID 16KIS1037 and ID 16KIS1039). Moreover, JK was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – SFB 1119 – 236615297. The authors thank Stathis Deligeorgopoulos for his preliminary work on TLS.
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Roth, J., Karatsiolis, E., Krämer, J. (2021). Classic McEliece Implementation with Low Memory Footprint. In: Liardet, PY., Mentens, N. (eds) Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications. CARDIS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12609. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68487-7_3
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