Authors:
Ameera Salem Al Abdouli
;
Mohamed Al Ali
;
Emanuele Bellini
;
Florian Caullery
;
Alexandros Hasikos
;
Marc Manzano
and
Victor Mateu
Affiliation:
DarkMatter and U.A.E.
Keyword(s):
Code-based Cryptography, Public Key Cryptography, Cryptosystem, Software Implementation, Post-quantum Cryptography.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applied Cryptography
;
Cryptographic Techniques and Key Management
;
Data Engineering
;
Databases and Data Security
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Secure Software Development Methodologies
;
Security in Information Systems
;
Security Protocols
;
Software Security
Abstract:
We present and analyze the performance of DRANKULA, a McEliece-like cryptosystem implementation using rank metric instead of Hamming distance. Namely, we use the scheme proposed by Loidreau in PQCrypto 2017 using Gabidulin codes. We propose a set of carefully selected parameters and we address several nontrivial issues when porting this scheme into real-world systems as, for example, the generation of errors of a given rank. We provide the pseudo-code of the core algorithms of the cryptosystem. In addition, we also show code optimization when special instructions like Carry-less multiplications are available. Moreover, we argue how to have a practical and side-channel resistant version of the cryptosystem. We integrated the scheme in Open Quantum Safe and benchmarked it against the other schemes implemented there. Our results show that DRANKULA can be a practical alternative to other well-known quantum-safe schemes.