A lightweight McEliece cryptosystem co-processor design

Due to the rapid advances in the development of quantum computers and their susceptibility to errors, there is a renewed interest in error correction algorithms. In particular, error correcting code-based cryptosystems have reemerged as a highly desirable coding technique. This is due to the fact that most classical asymmetric cryptosystems will fail in the quantum computing era. Quantum computers can solve many of the integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems efficiently. However, code-based cryptosystems are still secure against quantum computers, since the decoding of linear codes remains as NP-hard even on these computing systems. One such cryptosystem is the McEliece code-based cryptosystem. The original McEliece code-based cryptosystem uses binary Goppa code, which is known for its good code rate and error correction capability. However, its key generation and decoding procedures have a high computation complexity. In this work we propose a design and hardware implementation of an public-key encryption and decryption co-processor based on a new variant of McEliece system. This co-processor takes the advantage of the non-binary Orthogonal Latin Square Codes to achieve much smaller computation complexity, hardware cost, and the key size.Published versio

A Lightweight McEliece Cryptosystem Co-processor Design

Due to the rapid advances in the development of quantum computers and their susceptibility to errors, there is a renewed interest in error correction algorithms. In particular, error correcting code-based cryptosystems have reemerged as a highly desirable coding technique. This is due to the fact that most classical asymmetric cryptosystems will fail in the quantum computing era. Quantum computers can solve many of the integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems efficiently. However, code-based cryptosystems are still secure against quantum computers, since the decoding of linear codes remains as NP-hard even on these computing systems. One such cryptosystem is the McEliece code-based cryptosystem. The original McEliece code-based cryptosystem uses binary Goppa code, which is known for its good code rate and error correction capability. However, its key generation and decoding procedures have a high computation complexity. In this work we propose a design and hardware implementation of an public-key encryption and decryption co-processor based on a new variant of McEliece system. This co-processor takes the advantage of the non-binary Orthogonal Latin Square Codes to achieve much smaller computation complexity, hardware cost, and the key size.Comment: 2019 Boston Area Architecture Workshop (BARC'19

Secure exchange of information by synchronization of neural networks

A connection between the theory of neural networks and cryptography is presented. A new phenomenon, namely synchronization of neural networks is leading to a new method of exchange of secret messages. Numerical simulations show that two artificial networks being trained by Hebbian learning rule on their mutual outputs develop an antiparallel state of their synaptic weights. The synchronized weights are used to construct an ephemeral key exchange protocol for a secure transmission of secret data. It is shown that an opponent who knows the protocol and all details of any transmission of the data has no chance to decrypt the secret message, since tracking the weights is a hard problem compared to synchronization. The complexity of the generation of the secure channel is linear with the size of the network.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Efficient Implementation on Low-Cost SoC-FPGAs of TLSv1.2 Protocol with ECC_AES Support for Secure IoT Coordinators

Security management for IoT applications is a critical research field, especially when taking into account the performance variation over the very different IoT devices. In this paper, we present high-performance client/server coordinators on low-cost SoC-FPGA devices for secure IoT data collection. Security is ensured by using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol based on the TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 cipher suite. The hardware architecture of the proposed coordinators is based on SW/HW co-design, implementing within the hardware accelerator core Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication (ECSM), which is the core operation of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC). Meanwhile, the control of the overall TLS scheme is performed in software by an ARM Cortex-A9 microprocessor. In fact, the implementation of the ECC accelerator core around an ARM microprocessor allows not only the improvement of ECSM execution but also the performance enhancement of the overall cryptosystem. The integration of the ARM processor enables to exploit the possibility of embedded Linux features for high system flexibility. As a result, the proposed ECC accelerator requires limited area, with only 3395 LUTs on the Zynq device used to perform high-speed, 233-bit ECSMs in 413 µs, with a 50 MHz clock. Moreover, the generation of a 384-bit TLS handshake secret key between client and server coordinators requires 67.5 ms on a low cost Zynq 7Z007S device

A Survey on Homomorphic Encryption Schemes: Theory and Implementation

Legacy encryption systems depend on sharing a key (public or private) among the peers involved in exchanging an encrypted message. However, this approach poses privacy concerns. Especially with popular cloud services, the control over the privacy of the sensitive data is lost. Even when the keys are not shared, the encrypted material is shared with a third party that does not necessarily need to access the content. Moreover, untrusted servers, providers, and cloud operators can keep identifying elements of users long after users end the relationship with the services. Indeed, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), a special kind of encryption scheme, can address these concerns as it allows any third party to operate on the encrypted data without decrypting it in advance. Although this extremely useful feature of the HE scheme has been known for over 30 years, the first plausible and achievable Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme, which allows any computable function to perform on the encrypted data, was introduced by Craig Gentry in 2009. Even though this was a major achievement, different implementations so far demonstrated that FHE still needs to be improved significantly to be practical on every platform. First, we present the basics of HE and the details of the well-known Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) and Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SWHE), which are important pillars of achieving FHE. Then, the main FHE families, which have become the base for the other follow-up FHE schemes are presented. Furthermore, the implementations and recent improvements in Gentry-type FHE schemes are also surveyed. Finally, further research directions are discussed. This survey is intended to give a clear knowledge and foundation to researchers and practitioners interested in knowing, applying, as well as extending the state of the art HE, PHE, SWHE, and FHE systems.Comment: - Updated. (October 6, 2017) - This paper is an early draft of the survey that is being submitted to ACM CSUR and has been uploaded to arXiv for feedback from stakeholder

Analysis of Parallel Montgomery Multiplication in CUDA

For a given level of security, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) offers improved efficiency over classic public key implementations. Point multiplication is the most common operation in ECC and, consequently, any significant improvement in perfor- mance will likely require accelerating point multiplication. In ECC, the Montgomery algorithm is widely used for point multiplication. The primary purpose of this project is to implement and analyze a parallel implementation of the Montgomery algorithm as it is used in ECC. Specifically, the performance of CPU-based Montgomery multiplication and a GPU-based implementation in CUDA are compared