Post-Quantum Secure Digital Signatures on Embedded Systems

Speaker: 
Wen Wang
Seminar Date: 
Friday, November 8, 2019 - 12:30pm
Location: 
Mann Student Center, Dunham Lab 107 See map
Hillhouse Av
New Haven, CT

Embedded devices play an important role in our daily life, and more and more sensitive information is being processed on these devices each day. Therefore, embedded devices must provide a high level of protection against cyber attacks – despite their typically restricted computing resources. Commonly used cryptographic algorithms to secure these devices, however, are vulnerable to attacks using quantum computers. In the light of recent advances in quantum-computer development, a new field of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) has evolved, which provides cryptographic algorithms that are believed to be secure against using quantum computers. This talk focuses on one of the post-quantum secure signature schemes, the eXtended Merkle Signature Scheme (XMSS), which has been standardized by the IETF. XMSS have relatively high resource requirements. Therefore, running such post-quantum secure schemes efficiently on a resource-constraint embedded system is a difficult task. This talk introduces a number of hardware accelerators that provide a good time-area trade-off for implementing XMSS on RISC-V. Our experiments running on FPGAs demonstrate the feasibility of efficiently deploying the post-quantum signature scheme XMSS on an embedded device.

Host: 
Corey O'Hern