MicroEliece: McEliece for Embedded Devices

Abstract

Most advanced security systems rely on public-key schemes based either on the factorization or the discrete logarithm problem. Since both problems are known to be closely related, a major breakthrough in cryptanalysis tackling one of those problems could render a large set of cryptosystems completely useless. The McEliece public-key scheme is based on the alternative security assumption that decoding unknown linear binary codes is NP-complete. In this work, we investigate the efficient implementation of the McEliece scheme on embedded systems what was-up to date-considered a challenge due to the required storage of its large keys. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the McEliece encryption scheme is implemented on a low-cost 8-bit AVR microprocessor and a Xilinx Spartan-3AN FPGA.

Code Based Cryptography and Steganography

“…In [22], on a 32 bits processor, for a security level of 2 128 , the software implementation of Mc Eliece's cryptosystem gains an order of magnitude for both encryption and decryption compared to RSA-2048 (CPU cycles are divided by 5 per byte to encrypt and by 100 per byte to decrypt). An 8-bit version for AVR microprocessors and for FPGA is described in [39]. Once again, results show that Mc Eliece's cryptosystem gives better results compared to RSA but not compared to elliptic cryptosystems.. A smart card implementation (16 bits processor) is described in [102], ciphering and deciphering is done in less than 2 seconds for a 2048 code length.…”

Stream Cipher by Reed-Solomon Codes

“…By contrast, people also seek approaches to implement more secure code by public key cryptography. Code based cryptography [11] with Goppa codes [12] or MDPC codes [13], for example, can be applied to realize McEliece system . Meanwhile, generalized RS code can also be used to implement asymmetric cryptography [6], which brings out short keys compared with that obtained by Goppa code.…”

Timing Attacks against the Syndrome Inversion in Code-Based Cryptosystems

“…Accordingly, they have received growing interested from researchers in the past years and been analyzed with respect to efficiency on various platforms [4][5][6][7][8]. Furthermore, a growing number of works has investigated the side channel security of code-based cryptosystems [9][10][11][12][13][14].…”