MicroEliece: McEliece for Embedded Devices

  • Authors:
  • Thomas Eisenbarth;Tim Güneysu;Stefan Heyse;Christof Paar

  • Affiliations:
  • Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany 44780;Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany 44780;Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany 44780;Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany 44780

  • Venue:
  • CHES '09 Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Most advanced security systems rely on public-key schemes based either on the factorization or the discrete logarithm problem. Since both problems are known to be closely related, a major breakthrough in cryptanalysis tackling one of those problems could render a large set of cryptosystems completely useless. The McEliece public-key scheme is based on the alternative security assumption that decoding unknown linear binary codes is NP-complete. In this work, we investigate the efficient implementation of the McEliece scheme on embedded systems what was --- up to date --- considered a challenge due to the required storage of its large keys. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the McEliece encryption scheme is implemented on a low-cost 8-bit AVR microprocessor and a Xilinx Spartan-3AN FPGA.