Isogeny-based post-quantum key exchange protocols

The goal of this project is to understand and analyze the supersingular isogeny Diffie Hellman (SIDH), a post-quantum key exchange protocol which security lies on the isogeny-finding problem between supersingular elliptic curves. In order to do so, we first introduce the reader to cryptography focusing on key agreement protocols and motivate the rise of post-quantum cryptography as a necessity with the existence of the model of quantum computation. We review some of the known attacks on the SIDH and finally study some algorithmic aspects to understand how the protocol can be implemented

Optimization of Supersingular Isogeny Cryptography for Deeply Embedded Systems

Public-key cryptography in use today can be broken by a quantum computer with sufficient resources. Microsoft Research has published an open-source library of quantum-secure supersingular isogeny (SI) algorithms including Diffie-Hellman key agreement and key encapsulation in portable C and optimized x86 and x64 implementations. For our research, we modified this library to target a deeply-embedded processor with instruction set extensions and a finite-field coprocessor originally designed to accelerate traditional elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). We observed a 6.3-7.5x improvement over a portable C implementation using instruction set extensions and a further 6.0-6.1x improvement with the addition of the coprocessor. Modification of the coprocessor to a wider datapath further increased performance 2.6-2.9x. Our results show that current traditional ECC implementations can be easily refactored to use supersingular elliptic curve arithmetic and achieve post-quantum security

Optimizations of Isogeny-based Key Exchange

Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) is a key exchange scheme that is believed to be quantum-resistant. It is based on the difficulty of finding a certain isogeny between given elliptic curves. Over the last nine years, optimizations have been proposed that significantly increased the performance of its implementations. Today, SIDH is a promising candidate in the US National Institute for Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) post-quantum cryptography standardization process. This work is a self-contained introduction to the active research on SIDH from a high-level, algorithmic lens. After an introduction to elliptic curves and SIDH itself, we describe the mathematical and algorithmic building blocks of the fastest known implementations. Regarding elliptic curves, we describe which algorithms, data structures and trade-offs regard- ing elliptic curve arithmetic and isogeny computations exist and quantify their runtime cost in field operations. These findings are then tailored to the situation of SIDH. As a result, we give efficient algorithms for the performance-critical parts of the protocol

Quantum Attacks on Modern Cryptography and Post-Quantum Cryptosystems

Cryptography is a critical technology in the modern computing industry, but the security of many cryptosystems relies on the difficulty of mathematical problems such as integer factorization and discrete logarithms. Large quantum computers can solve these problems efficiently, enabling the effective cryptanalysis of many common cryptosystems using such algorithms as Shor’s and Grover’s. If data integrity and security are to be preserved in the future, the algorithms that are vulnerable to quantum cryptanalytic techniques must be phased out in favor of quantum-proof cryptosystems. While quantum computer technology is still developing and is not yet capable of breaking commercial encryption, these steps can be taken immediately to ensure that the impending development of large quantum computers does not compromise sensitive data

Optimized Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation on ARMv8 Processors

In this work, we present highly-optimized constant-time software libraries for Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) protocol on ARMv8 processors. Our optimized hand-crafted assembly libraries provide the most efficient timing results on 64-bit ARM-powered devices. Moreover, the presented libraries can be integrated into any other cryptography primitives targeting the same finite field size. We design a new mixed implementation of field arithmetic on 64-bit ARM processors by exploiting the A64 and Advanced SIMD processing units working in parallel. Using these techniques, we are able to improve the performance of the entire protocol by the factor of 5 times compared to optimized C implementations on 64-bit ARM high-performance cores, providing 83-, 124-, and 159-bit quantum-security levels. Furthermore, we compare the performance of our proposed library with the previous highly-optimized ARMv8 assembly library available in the literature. The implementation results illustrate the overall 10% performance improvement in comparison with previous work, highlighting the benefit of using mixed implementation over relatively-large finite field size

18 Seconds to Key Exchange: Limitations of Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman on Embedded Devices

The quantum secure supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) key exchange is a promising candidate in NIST\u27s on-going post-quantum standardization process. The evaluation of various implementation characteristics is part of this standardization process, and includes the assessment of the applicability on constrained devices. When compared to other post-quantum algorithms, SIDH appears to be well-suited for the implementation on those constrained devices due to its small key sizes. On the other hand, SIDH is computationally complex, which presumably results in long computation times. Since there are no published results to test this assumption, we present speed-optimized implementations for two small microcontrollers and set a first benchmark that can be of relevance for the standardization process. We use state-of-the art field arithmetic algorithms and optimize them in assembly. However, an ephemeral key exchange still requires more than 18 seconds on a 32-bit Cortex-M4 and more than 11 minutes on a 16-bit MSP430. Those results show that even with an improvement by a factor of 4, SIDH is in-fact impractical for small embedded devices, regardless of further possible improvements in the implementation. On a positive note, we also analyzed the implementation security of SIDH and found that appropriate DPA countermeasures can be implemented with little overhead

Towards Optimized and Constant-Time CSIDH on Embedded Devices

We present an optimized, constant-time software library for commutative supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman key exchange (CSIDH) proposed by Castryck et al. which targets 64-bit ARM processors. The proposed library is implemented based on highly-optimized field arithmetic operations and computes the entire key exchange in constant-time. The proposed implementation is resistant to timing attacks. We adopt optimization techniques to evaluate the highest performance CSIDH on ARM-powered embedded devices such as cellphones, analyzing the possibility of using such a scheme in the quantum era. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed implementation is the first constant-time implementation of CSIDH and the first evaluation of this scheme on embedded devices. The benchmark result on a Google Pixel 2 smartphone equipped with 64-bit high-performance ARM Cortex-A72 core shows that it takes almost 12 seconds for each party to compute a commutative action operation in constant-time over the 511-bit finite field proposed by Castryck et al. However, using uniform but variable-time Montgomery ladder with security considerations improves these results significantly

How Not to Create an Isogeny-Based PAKE

Isogeny-based key establishment protocols are believed to be resistant to quantum cryptanalysis. Two such protocols---supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) and commutative supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman (CSIDH)---are of particular interest because of their extremely small public key sizes compared with other post-quantum candidates. Although SIDH and CSIDH allow us to achieve key establishment against passive adversaries and authenticated key establishment (using generic constructions), there has been little progress in the creation of provably-secure isogeny-based password-authenticated key establishment protocols (PAKEs). This is in stark contrast with the classical setting, where the Diffie-Hellman protocol can be tweaked in a number of straightforward ways to construct PAKEs, such as EKE, SPEKE, PAK (and variants), J-PAKE, and Dragonfly. Although SIDH and CSIDH superficially resemble Diffie-Hellman, it is often difficult or impossible to ``translate\u27\u27 these Diffie-Hellman-based protocols to the SIDH or CSIDH setting; worse still, even when the construction can be ``translated,\u27\u27 the resultant protocol may be insecure, even if the Diffie-Hellman based protocol is secure. In particular, a recent paper of Terada and Yoneyama and ProvSec 2019 purports to instantiate encrypted key exchange (EKE) over SIDH and CSIDH; however, there is a subtle problem which leads to an offline dictionary attack on the protocol, rendering it insecure. In this work we present man-in-the-middle and offline dictionary attacks on isogeny-based PAKEs from the literature, and explain why other classical constructions do not ``translate\u27\u27 securely to the isogeny-based setting