An Evaluation of the State-of-the-Art Software and Hardware Implementations of BIKE

TL;DR

This paper reviews and compares current software, hardware, and hybrid implementations of the BIKE post-quantum cryptographic scheme, assessing their performance and resource use for NIST's standardization efforts.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview and evaluation of state-of-the-art BIKE implementations across different platforms, aiding standardization decisions.

Findings

Hardware implementations show optimized resource utilization.

Software implementations vary in performance efficiency.

Hybrid solutions balance performance and resource consumption.

Abstract

NIST is conducting a process for the standardization of post-quantum cryptosystems, i.e., cryptosystems that are resistant to attacks by both traditional and quantum computers and that can thus substitute the traditional public-key cryptography solutions which are expected to be broken by quantum computers in the next decades. This manuscript provides an overview and a comparison of the existing state-of-the-art implementations of the BIKE QC-MDPC code-based post-quantum KEM, a candidate in NIST's PQC standardization process. We consider both software, hardware, and mixed hardware-software implementations and evaluate their performance and, for hardware ones, their resource utilization.