Hardware Implementation of a Polar Code-based Public Key Cryptosystem

TL;DR

This paper implements a post-quantum public key cryptosystem based on polar codes on Raspberry Pi3, evaluating its performance and comparing it to McEliece, showing improved efficiency in execution time, energy, and memory usage.

Contribution

The paper provides the first hardware implementation and performance analysis of a polar code-based cryptosystem, demonstrating its practical advantages over McEliece.

Findings

PKC-PC has shorter encryption/decryption times than McEliece.

PKC-PC consumes less energy and memory during operation.

Performance metrics vary with different polar code parameters.

Abstract

In recent years, there have been many studies on quantum computing and the construction of quantum computers which are capable of breaking conventional number theory-based public key cryptosystems. Therefore, in the not-too-distant future, we need the public key cryptosystems that withstand against the attacks executed by quantum computers, so-called post-quantum cryptosystems. A public key cryptosystem based on polar codes (PKC-PC) has recently been introduced whose security depends on the difficulty of solving the general decoding problem of polar code. In this paper, we first implement the encryption, key generation and decryption algorithms of PKC-PC on Raspberry Pi3. Then, to evaluate its performance, we have measured several related parameters such as execution time, energy consumption, memory consumption and CPU utilization. All these metrics are investigated for encryption/decryption algorithms of PKC-PC with various parameters of polar codes. In the next step, the investigated parameters are compared to the implemented McEliece public key cryptosystem. Analyses of such results show that the execution time of encryption/decryption as well as the energy and memory consumption of PKC-PC is shorter than the McEliece cryptosystem.