A Novel Cryptoprocessor Architecture for the McEliece Public-Key Cryptosystem

Author

Shoufan, Abdulhadi ; Wink, Thorsten ; Molter, H. Gregor ; Huss, Sorin A. ; Kohnert, Eike

Author_Institution

Center for Adv. Security Res. Darmstadt CASED, Darmstadt, Germany

Volume

59

Issue

11

fYear

2010

Firstpage

1533

Lastpage

1546

Abstract

The McEliece public-key cryptosystem relies on the NP-hard decoding problem, and therefore, is regarded as a solution for postquantum cryptography. Though early known, this cryptosystem was not employed so far because of efficiency questions regarding performance and communication overhead. This paper presents a novel processor architecture as a high-performance platform to execute key generation, encryption, and decryption according to this cryptosystem. A prototype of this processor is realized on a reconfigurable device and tested via a dedicated software interface. A comparison with a similar software solution highlights the performance advantage of the proposed hardware solution.

Keywords

application program interfaces; field programmable gate arrays; public key cryptography; quantum cryptography; McEliece public-key cryptosystem; NP-hard decoding problem; cryptoprocessor architecture; dedicated software interface; key decryption; key encryption; key generation; postquantum cryptography; reconfigurable device; Application specific integrated circuits; Character generation; Computer architecture; Decoding; Encoding; Hardware; Public key; Public key cryptography; Quantum computing; Security; Cryptography hardware and implementation; FPGA.; Goppa code; McEliece cryptosystem; cryptoprocessor;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computers, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9340

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TC.2010.115

Filename

5477413