Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange on 64-Bit ARM

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We present an efficient implementation of the supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) key exchange protocol on 64-bit ARMv8 processors for 125- and 160-bit post-quantum security levels. We analyze the use of both affine and projective SIDH formulas and provide a comprehensive analysis of both approaches based on the inversion-to-multiplication ratio. Implementation results show that regardless of security concerns, affine SIDH is competitive with the projective coordinates implementation, and even outperforms projective implementation in the final round of SIDH; however, projective SIDH shows better overall performance for the whole key exchange protocol. Notably, over larger finite fields, using optimized field multiplication leads to the much better performance of projective compared to affine formulas. We integrate our optimized software into the open quantum-safe OpenSSL library and compare our software with other available post-quantum primitives. The benchmark results on ARMv8 demonstrate speedup of up to 5X over the generic version of SIDH implementation which is available inside the OQS library for the same quantum security level. We observe that our highly-optimized implementation still suffers from a large number of operations for computing isogenies of elliptic curves. However, in terms of communication overhead, supersingular isogeny-based cryptosystem provides significantly smaller key size compared to its counterparts.