From Pre-Quantum to Post-Quantum IoT Security: A Survey on Quantum-Resistant Cryptosystems for the Internet of Things

© 2020 IEEE. This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[Absctract]: Although quantum computing is still in its nascent age, its evolution threatens the most popular public-key encryption systems. Such systems are essential for today's Internet security due to their ability for solving the key distribution problem and for providing high security in insecure communications channels that allow for accessing websites or for exchanging e-mails, financial transactions, digitally signed documents, military communications or medical data. Cryptosystems like Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) or Diffie-Hellman have spread worldwide and are part of diverse key Internet standards like Transport Layer Security (TLS), which are used both by traditional computers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It is especially difficult to provide high security to IoT devices, mainly because many of them rely on batteries and are resource constrained in terms of computational power and memory, which implies that specific energy-efficient and lightweight algorithms need to be designed and implemented for them. These restrictions become relevant challenges when implementing cryptosystems that involve intensive mathematical operations and demand substantial computational resources, which are often required in applications where data privacy has to be preserved for the long term, like IoT applications for defense, mission-critical scenarios or smart healthcare. Quantum computing threatens such a long-term IoT device security and researchers are currently developing solutions to mitigate such a threat. This article provides a survey on what can be called post-quantum IoT systems (IoT systems protected from the currently known quantum computing attacks): the main post-quantum cryptosystems and initiatives are reviewed, the most relevant IoT architectures and challenges are analyzed, and the expected future trends are indicated. Thus, this article is aimed at providing a wide view of post-quantum IoT security and give useful guidelines...This work was supported in part by the Xunta de Galicia under Grant ED431G2019/01, in part by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of Spain under Grant TEC2016-75067-C4- 1-R and Grant RED2018-102668-T, and in part by ERDF funds of the EU (AEI/FEDER, UE).Xunta de Galicia; ED431G2019/0

Memory-Efficient High-Speed Implementation of Kyber on Cortex-M4

This paper presents an optimized software implementation of the module-lattice-based key-encapsulation mechanism Kyber for the ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. Kyber is one of the round-2 candidates in the NIST post-quantum project. In the center of our work are novel optimization techniques for the number-theoretic transform (NTT) inside Kyber, which make very efficient use of the computational power offered by the “vector” DSP instructions of the target architecture. We also present results for the recently updated parameter sets of Kyber which equally benefit from our optimizations. As a result of our efforts we present software that is 18% faster than an earlier implementation of Kyber optimized for the Cortex-M4 by the Kyber submitters. Our NTT is more than twice as fast as the NTT in that software. Our software runs at about the same speed as the latest speed-optimized implementation of the other module-lattice based round-2 NIST PQC candidate Saber. However, for our Kyber software, this performance is achieved with a much smaller RAM footprint. Kyber needs less than half of the RAM of what the considerably slower RAM-optimized version of Saber uses. Our software does not make use of any secret-dependent branches or memory access and thus offers state-of-the-art protection against timing attack

HILA5: On Reliability, Reconciliation, and Error Correction for Ring-LWE Encryption

We describe a new reconciliation method for Ring-LWE that has a significantly smaller failure rate than previous proposals while reducing ciphertext size and the amount of randomness required. It is based on a simple, deterministic variant of Peikert\u27s reconciliation that works with our new ``safe bits\u27\u27 selection and constant-time error correction techniques. The new method does not need randomized smoothing to achieve non-biased secrets. When used with the very efficient ``New Hope\u27\u27 Ring-LWE parametrization we achieve a decryption failure rate well below $2^{-128}$ (compared to $2^{-60}$ of the original), making the scheme suitable for public key encryption in addition to key exchange protocols; the reconciliation approach saves about $40 \%$ in ciphertext size when compared to the common LP11 Ring-LWE encryption scheme. We perform a combinatorial failure analysis using full probability convolutions, leading to a precise understanding of decryption failure conditions on bit level. Even with additional implementation security and safety measures the new scheme is still essentially as fast as the New Hope but has slightly shorter messages. The new techniques have been instantiated and implemented as a Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) and public key encryption scheme designed to meet the requirements of NIST\u27s Post-Quantum Cryptography effort at very high security level

pqm4: Testing and Benchmarking NIST PQC on ARM Cortex-M4

This paper presents pqm4 – a testing and benchmarking framework for the ARM Cortex-M4. It makes use of a widely available discovery board with 196 KiB of memory and 1 MiB flash ROM. It currently includes 10 key encapsulation mechanisms and 5 signature schemes of the NIST PQC competition. For the remaining 11 schemes, the available implementations do require more than the available memory or they depend on external libraries which makes them arguably unsuitable for embedded devices

Optimal Key Consensus in Presence of Noise

In this work, we abstract some key ingredients in previous key exchange protocols based on LWE and its variants, by introducing and formalizing the building tool, referred to as key consensus (KC) and its asymmetric variant AKC. KC and AKC allow two communicating parties to reach consensus from close values obtained by some secure information exchange. We then discover upper bounds on parameters for any KC and AKC. KC and AKC are fundamental to lattice based cryptography, in the sense that a list of cryptographic primitives based on LWE and its variants (including key exchange, public-key encryption, and more) can be modularly constructed from them. As a conceptual contribution, this much simplifies the design and analysis of these cryptosystems in the future. We then design and analyze both general and highly practical KC and AKC schemes, which are referred to as OKCN and AKCN respectively for presentation simplicity. Based on KC and AKC, we present generic constructions of key exchange (KE) from LWR, LWE, RLWE and MLWE. The generic construction allows versatile instantiations with our OKCN and AKCN schemes, for which we elaborate on evaluating and choosing the concrete parameters in order to achieve a well-balanced performance among security, computational cost, bandwidth efficiency, error rate, and operation simplicity

A new hope on ARM Cortex-M

Contains fulltext : 166155.pdf (preprint version ) (Open Access)Security, Privacy, and Advanced Cryptography Engineering: 6th International Conference, SPACE 2016, Hyderabad, India, December 14-18, 201