International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 29 November 2025

Frank Hartmann
ePrint Report ePrint Report
FrodoKEM provides conservative post-quantum security through unstructured lattices, yet its deployment on embedded systems is historically constrained by high memory requirements. While state-of-the-art implementations mitigate this by generating the public matrix on-the-fly, they remain bottlenecked by the sequential generation of secret matrices, which enforces a rigid trade-off between stack usage and recomputation overhead. To address this, we propose a blockwise secret generation mechanism that enables efficient random access to arbitrary matrix tiles. We formally prove that this modification is indistinguishable from the standard specification in the Random Oracle Model, thereby preserving IND-CCA2 security. By evaluating this approach on a 32-bit RISC-V core with custom cryptographic extensions, we demonstrate tiled encapsulation and key generation strategies that maintain constant transient stack usage ($\approx$2--3 kB) across all parameter sets. This design effectively decouples memory footprint from algorithmic complexity, enabling flexible buffering strategies that optimize performance according to the available heap memory of the target platform.
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