Reconciliation based key exchange schemes using lattices: a review

Abstract

Lattice-based cryptography is one of the emerging fields of cryptography in the post-quantum world. It is resistive to quantum attacks and has performance competitive to that of prevalent cryptosystem such as Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA), Diffie Hellman etc. Till now, various basic cryptographic primitives like encryption and decryption, digital signature, hash-based functions, and key exchange are proposed in lattice-based cryptography. The key exchange primitive is one of the basic cryptographic primitives of the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Lattices are preferably used to design provably secure reconciliation based key exchange protocols against quantum attacks. However, the literature pertaining to the study of reconciliation based key exchange protocols is limited and often the schemes are studied independently. Therefore, in this work, we have reviewed the reconciliation based key exchange schemes and classify these schemes under two different categories depending on the reconciliation mechanism used by the scheme. We also point out the basic key exchange schemes upon which all other key exchange schemes are based. We conduct a complete review, security analysis, implementation and comparison of these basic key exchange schemes.