Implementation of a post-quantum encryption scheme with physical security guarantees

Details

Supervisors

Standaert, François-Xavier ; Peters, Thomas

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil en informatique, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

As the possible arrival of quantum computers in the future decades made classical asymmetric encryption techniques obsolete, many new schemes based on new assumptions were developed in recent years. The lack of consideration for Side Channel Attacks (SCA) in their design led to important overcost when applying usual protections such as masking. Recently, a new scheme, coined POLKA, has been designed to obtain high-security against such attacks with reduced overcost. In this paper, we present a masked software implementation of this new scheme and evaluate its performances on a common low-end microcontroller compared to the recent winner of the NIST's Post-Quantum Standardization competition, KYBER. As a result, POLKA achieves better efficiency than a masked implementation of KYBER as soon as we increase the degree of masking and highlight the use of NTTs as an interesting room for latency improvement.