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Speeding-up Post-Quantum Cryptography on an RSA Co-Processor

Speeding-up Post-Quantum Cryptography on an RSA Co-Processor

Supervisor(s): Felix Oberhansl, Tobias Stelzer
Status: inprogress
Topic: Others
Author: Horia Turcuman
Submission: 2023-11-15
Type of Thesis: Masterthesis
Thesis topic in co-operation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC, Garching

Description

Master Thesis
Speeding-up Post-Quantum Cryptography on an
RSA Co-Processor
Motivation
Recent advances in the field of quantum computers threaten our public key cryptography. A lar-
ge enough quantum computer can easily break RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. Lattice-based
cryptography has been selected by the US National Institute for Standards and Technology as a
replacement. The polynomial arithmetic within lattices can be challenging to implement on constrai-
ned IoT devices. Therefore, researchers put effort into re-using cryptographic RSA accelerators for
lattice-based cryptography.
Task Description
The goal of this thesis is to evaluate one or more mathematical mappings of polynomials defined
over rings to big integers in a finite field. Recent work on this can be found in papers by Albrecht et
al.1 and Bos et al.2. The target platform is Google’s open source processor OpenTitan3 and its big
number accelerator OTBN. Within this thesis the student evaluates different algorithms for polynomial multiplication regarding their performance and memory overhead.
Requirements
• Familiar with embedded systems programming: C or Rust
• Familiar with assembly programming
• Motivation to work with post quantum cryptography and its mathematical representations
• Motivation to work with cryptographic coprocessors
Kontakt
Felix Oberhansl,  Tobias Stelzer
Telefon: +49 89 322-9986-156 Telefon: +49 89 322-9986-0916
E-Mail: felix.oberhansl@aisec.fraunhofer.de E-Mail: tobias.stelzer@aisec.fraunhofer.de
Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC)
Hardware Security Department
Lichtenbergstraße 11, 85748 Garching (near Munich), Germany
https://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de
1https://doi.org/10.13154/tches.v2019.i1.169-208
2https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1303
3https://github.com/lowRISC/opentitan