Efficient Low-Memory Classic McEliece Implementation 🛡️ | 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.