Classic McEliece Implementation with Low Memory Footprint - CARDIS 2020

Authors: Johannes Roth, Evangelos Karatsiolis, and Juliane Krämer Conference: CARDIS 2020, Nov 18-19 2020 Abstract: The Classic McEliece cryptosystem is one of the most trusted quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes. Deploying it in practical ap- plications, however, is challenging due to the size of its public key. In this work, we bridge this gap. We present an implementation of Clas- sic McEliece on an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, optimized to overcome memory constraints. To this end, we present an algorithm to retrieve the public key ad-hoc. This reduces memory and storage requirements and enables the generation of larger key pairs on the device. To further improve the implementation, we perform the public key operation by streaming the key to avoid storing it as a whole. This additionally re- duces the risk of denial of service attacks. Finally, we use these results to implement and run TLS on the embedded device.