Addressing the looming threat posed by quantum computers capable of breaching current public key cryptography schemes has become imperative. To this end, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiated a competition in Post-Quantum Cryptography, resulting in the selection of four schemes as the new standardized replacements, while a fourth round and an additional signature round is still ongoing. Notably, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, a lattice-based signature scheme, has exhibited promising resilience due to its efficiency and simplicity. Despite the finalization of standardization for these new four schemes, transitioning from classical cryptography to these alternatives necessitates further investigation and analysis. Comprehensive scrutiny of these newly standardized schemes is imperative, including considerations of implementation efficiency across various platforms and side-channel vulnerability analysis. This article introduces a novel design leveraging physical unclonable functions to bolster the physical security of CRYSTALS-Dilithium. Physical security is paramount in scenarios where network nodes are exposed to public scrutiny, potentially making them targets for adversaries. After discussing the advantages of our design compared to the original design, we implemented it on two different architectures, ARMv7 and ARMv8. Our results indicate substantial improvements in both security and performance compared to existing references. Moreover, noting the new competition initiated by the NIST in 2023 for new signatures (first round finalized in October 2024), potentially the proposed schemes can be adopted to the new standards set to be finalized in the coming years. These make our scheme not solely confined to the current standards and would be an important merit of the presented approaches.

Significant performance improvements in bandwidth and latency make 5G a suitable candidate for a wide range of applications, particularly those requiring real-time communication, such as Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and autonomous vehicles. However, today’s security, including modern cryptographic systems, is prone to different attacks caused by the high computational power of quantum computing, highlighting the need for integrating quantum-resistant security measures. To accommodate attacks targeted at 5G networks, there are efforts to move towards TLS-based security, which is the widely accepted standard across networks. However, integrating post-quantum algorithms must also be considered in such a transition. Thus, this paper is the first to perform the integration of Post-quantum TLS (PQ-TLS) protocols into 5G networks and offer a realistic performance evaluation. Our approach focuses on integrating PQ-TLS into the 5G control plane (CP) without requiring a major overhaul, thus ensuring communications’ interoperability even with legacy components of 5G, which may not support TLS. Specifically, we have updated the registration and authentication protocols for both core network functions and user equipment (UE) by implementing a TLS tunneling approach through virtualization. We then evaluate the performance and feasibility of PQ-TLS in enhancing the security of 5G communications on an actual testbed. Our results demonstrate that while PQ algorithms introduce some overhead, they remain viable for 5G applications, particularly for protocols that can run on the core network.

It is well-studied that quantum computing breaks the security of the current worldwide implemented public key cryptosystems. This forces us toward post quantum cryptography (PQC) whose security remains solid even against adversaries having access to quantum computers. For this matter, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced four winners in 2022. Among them, CRYSTALS-Kyber which is the only KEM/PKE algorithm, is the aim of this paper. In this paper, through using physical unclonable functions (PUF) and true random number generators (TRNG), we improve the overall security of Kyber and provide physical security to it. Our implementation results on ARMv7 and ARMv8 architectures, indicate significant speedup, compared to the reference work. For example, for the CCA.KEM-KeyGen() algorithm, we achieved roughly 26%, 13%, and 10% speedup at security levels of 512, 768, and 1024 on ARMv7 implementation, and 25%, 12%, and 10% for ARMv8 implementation. Comparing the implementation results of our design with the reference work indicates that both the security and the system performance are improved.

We present the first practical software implementation of Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) round 2, targeting NIST's 1, 2, 3, and 5 security levels on 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontrollers. The proposed library introduces a new speed record of all SIKE Round 2 protocols with reasonable memory consumption on the low-end target platform. We achieved this record by adopting several state-of-the-art engineering techniques as well as highly-optimized hand-crafted assembly implementation of finite field arithmetic. In particular, we carefully redesign the previous optimized implementations of finite field arithmetic on the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 platform and propose a set of novel techniques which are explicitly suitable for SIKE primes. The benchmark result on STM32F4 Discovery board equipped with 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontrollers shows that entire key encapsulation and decapsultation over SIKEp434 take about 184 million clock cycles (i.e., 1.09 seconds @168 MHz). In contrast to the previous optimized implementation of the isogeny-based key exchange on low-end 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4, our performance evaluation shows feasibility of using SIKE mechanism on the low-end platform. In comparison to the most of the post-quantum candidates, SIKE requires an excessive number of arithmetic operations, resulting in significantly slower timings. However, its small key size makes this scheme as a promising candidate on low-end microcontrollers in the quantum era by ensuring the lower energy consumption for key transmission than other schemes.

The Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation mechanism (SIKE) is the only post-quantum key encapsulation protocol based on elliptic curves and isogeny maps between them. Despite the quantum security of the protocol, SIKE requires a greater number of clock cycles and hence does not provide competitive timing and energy consumption results. However, it is more attractive offering the smallest public key as well as ciphertext sizes, which considering the impact of the communication costs and storage of the keys could become a good fit for resource-constrained devices. In this work, we present the fastest practical implementation of SIKE, targeting the platform Cortex-M4 based on the ARMv7-M architecture. We performed our measurements on the STM32F407VG microcontroller for benchmarking the clock cycles and on Nucleo-F411RE attached to X-NUCLEO-LPM01A (Power Shield) for measuring the energy consumption of the protocol. The low-level finite field arithmetic operations play main role in determining the efficiency of SIKE. Therefore, we mainly focus on their optimization and apply them to all NIST-required security levels. Our SIKEp434 implementation for NIST security level 1 is about 22.97% faster than the counterparts appeared in Seoet al.(2020), where for the SIKEp503, SIKEp610 and SIKEp751 the speedup reaches 21.10%, 19.21% and 19.08%. Finally, we benchmark energy consumption and report optimization of up to 11.9% depending on the NIST security level implementation.