Code-based cryptography on reconfigurable hardware: tweaking Niederreiter encryption for performance

Abstract

Today’s public-key schemes that are either based on the factorization or the discrete logarithm problem. Since both problems are closely related, a major breakthrough in cryptanalysis (e.g., with the advent of quantum computing will render nearly all currently employed security system useless. Code-based public-key schemes rely on the alternative security assumption that decoding generic linear binary codes is NP-complete. Two code-based schemes for public-key encryption are available due to McEliece and Niederreiter. Although most researchers analyzed and implemented McEliece’s cryptosystem, we show in this work that the scheme by Niederreiter has some important advantages, such as smaller keys, more practical plain and ciphertext sizes and less computation complexity. In particular, we propose an efficient FPGA implementation of Niederreiter’s scheme that can encrypt more than 1.5 million plaintexts per seconds on a Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA—outperforming all known implementations of other popular public-key cryptosystems so far.