International Association
for Cryptologic Research

BIKE is a key encapsulation mechanism that entered the third round of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process. This paper presents two constant-time implementations for BIKE, one tailored for the Intel Haswell and one tailored for the ARM Cortex-M4. Our Haswell implementation is much faster than the avx2 implementation written by the BIKE team: for bikel1, the level-1 parameter set, we achieve a 1.39x speedup for decapsulation (which is the slowest operation) and a 1.33x speedup for the sum of all operations. For bikel3, the level-3 parameter set, we achieve a 1.5x speedup for decapsulation and a 1.46x speedup for the sum of all operations. Our M4 implementation is more than two times faster than the non-constant-time implementation portable written by the BIKE team. The speedups are achieved by both algorithm-level and instruction-level optimizations.

This paper presents a constant-time implementation of Classic McEliece for ARM Cortex-M4. Specifically, our target platform is stm32f4-Discovery, a development board on which the amount of SRAM is not even large enough to hold the public key of the smallest parameter sets of Classic McEliece. Fortunately, the flash memory is large enough, so we use it to store the public key. For the level-1 parameter sets mceliece348864 and mceliece348864f, our implementation takes 582 199 cycles for encapsulation and 2 706 681 cycles for decapsulation. Compared to the level-1 parameter set of FrodoKEM, our encapsulation time is more than 80 times faster, and our decapsulation time is more than 17 times faster. For the level-3 parameter sets mceliece460896 and mceliece460896f, our implementation takes 1 081 335 cycles for encapsulation and 6 535 186 cycles for decapsulation. In addition, our implementation is also able to carry out key generation for the level-1 parameter sets and decapsulation for level-5 parameter sets on the board.

We propose SOFIA, the first $$\mathcal {MQ}$$MQ-based signature scheme provably secure in the quantum-accessible random oracle model (QROM). Our construction relies on an extended version of Unruh’s transform for 5-pass identification schemes that we describe and prove secure both in the ROM and QROM.Based on a detailed security analysis, we provide concrete parameters for SOFIA that achieve 128-bit post-quantum security. The result is SOFIA-4-128 with parameters carefully optimized to minimize signature size and maximize performance. SOFIA-4-128 comes with an implementation targeting recent Intel processors with the AVX2 vector-instruction set; the implementation is fully protected against timing attacks.

A recently proposed class of multivariate quadratic schemes, the Rainbow-Like signature Schemes, in which successive sets of central variables are obtained from previous ones by solving linear equations, seem to lead to efficient schemes (TTS, TRMS, and Rainbow) that perform well on systems of low computational resources. Recently SFLASH ($C^{\ast-}$) was broken by Dubois, Fouque, Shamir, and Stern via a differential attack. In this paper, we exhibit similar attacks based on differentials, that will reduce published Rainbow-like schemes below their security levels. We will present a new type of construction of Rainbow-Like schemes and design signature schemes with new parameters for practical applications.

We present a multivariate version of Hidden Field Equations (HFE) over a finite field of odd characteristic, with an extra ``embedding'' modifier. Combining these known ideas makes our new MPKC (multivariate public key cryptosystem) more efficient and scalable than any other extant multivariate encryption scheme. Switching to odd characteristics in HFE-like schemes affects how an attacker can make use of field equations. Extensive empirical tests (using MAGMA-2.14, the best commercially available \mathbold{F_4} implementation) suggests that our new construction is indeed secure against algebraic attacks using Gr\"obner Basis algorithms. The ``embedding'' serves both to narrow down choices of pre-images and to guard against a possible Kipnis-Shamir type (rank-based) attack. We may hence reasonably argue that for practical sizes, prior attacks take exponential time. We demonstrate that our construction is in fact efficient by implementing practical-sized examples of our ``odd-char HFE'' with 3 variables (``THFE'') over $\mathrm{GF}(31)$. To be precise, our preliminary THFE implementation is $15\times$--$20\times$ the speed of RSA-1024.