Efficient Software Implementation of Ring-LWE Encryption

Abstract

Present-day public-key cryptosystems such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) will become insecure when quantum computers become a reality. This paper presents the new state of the art in efficient software implementations of a post-quantum secure public-key encryption scheme based on the ring-LWE problem. We use a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller as the target platform. Our contribution includes optimization techniques for fast discrete Gaussian sampling and efficient polynomial multiplication. Our implementation beats all known software implementations of ring-LWE encryption by a factor of at least 7. We further show that our scheme beats ECC-based public-key encryption schemes by at least one order of magnitude. At medium-term security we require 121 166 cycles per encryption and 43 324 cycles per decryption, while at a long-term security we require 261 939 cycles per encryption and 96 520 cycles per decryption. Gaussian sampling is done at an average of 28.5 cycles per sample.