NewHope: A Mobile Implementation of a Post-Quantum Cryptographic Key Encapsulation Mechanism

NIST anticipates the appearance of large-scale quantum computers by 2036 [34], which will threaten widely used asymmetric algorithms, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project to find quantum-secure alternatives. NewHope post-quantum cryptography (PQC) key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) is the only Round 2 candidate to simultaneously achieve small key values through the use of a security problem with sufficient confidence its security, while mitigating any known vulnerabilities. This research contributes to NIST project’s overall goal by assessing the platform flexibility and resource requirements of NewHope KEMs on an Android mobile device. The resource requirements analyzed are transmission size as well as scheme runtime, central processing unit (CPU), memory, and energy usage. Results from each NewHope KEM instantiations are compared amongst each other, to a baseline application, and to results from previous work. NewHope PQC KEM was demonstrated to have sufficient flexibility for mobile implementation, competitive performance with other PQC KEMs, and to have competitive scheme runtime with current key exchange algorithms

Practical Lattice Cryptosystems: NTRUEncrypt and NTRUMLS

Public key cryptography, as deployed on the internet today, stands on shaky ground. For over twenty years now it has been known that the systems in widespread use are insecure against adversaries equipped with quantum computers -- a fact that has largely been discounted due to the enormous challenge of building such devices. However, research into the development of quantum computers is accelerating and is producing an abundance of positive results that indicate quantum computers could be built in the near future. As a result, individuals, corporations and government entities are calling for the deployment of new cryptography to replace systems that are vulnerable to quantum cryptanalysis. Few satisfying schemes are to be found. This work examines the design, parameter selection, and cryptanalysis of a post-quantum public key encryption scheme, NTRUEncrypt, and a related signature scheme, NTRUMLS. It is hoped that this analysis will prove useful in comparing these schemes against other candidates that have been proposed to replace existing infrastructure

Practical Signatures from the Partial Fourier Recovery Problem

Abstract. We present PASSSign, a variant of the prior PASS and PASS-2 proposals, as a candidate for a practical post-quantum signature scheme. Its hardness is based on the problem of recovering a ring element with small norm from an incomplete description of its Chinese remainder representation. For our particular instantiation, this corresponds to the recovery of a signal with small infinity norm from a limited set of its Fourier coefficients. The key improvement over previous versions of PASS is the introduction of a rejection sampling technique from Lyubashevsky (2009) which assures that transcript distributions are completely decoupled from the keys that generate them. Although the scheme is not supported by a formal security reduction, we present extensive arguments for its security and derive concrete parameters based on the performance of state of the art lattice reduction and enumeration techniques