International Association
for Cryptologic Research

SIDH/SIKE-style protocols benefit from key compression to minimize their bandwidth requirements, but proposed key compression mechanisms rely on computing bilinear pairings. Pairing computation is a notoriously expensive operation, and, unsurprisingly, it is typically one of the main efficiency bottlenecks in SIDH key compression, incurring processing time penalties that are only mitigated at the cost of trade-offs with precomputed tables. We address this issue by describing how to compress isogeny-based keys without pairings. As a bonus, we also substantially reduce the storage requirements of other operations involved in key compression.

This work deals with the energy-efficient, high-speed and high-security implementation of elliptic curve scalar multiplication and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange on embedded devices using Four$$\mathbb {Q}$$ and incorporating strong countermeasures to thwart a wide variety of side-channel attacks. First, we set new speed records for constant-time curve-based scalar multiplication and DH key exchange at the 128-bit security level with implementations targeting 8, 16 and 32-bit microcontrollers. For example, our software computes a static ECDH shared secret in $$\sim $$6.9 million cycles (or 0.86 s @8 MHz) on a low-power 8-bit AVR microcontroller which, compared to the fastest Curve25519 and genus-2 Kummer implementations on the same platform, offers 2$$\times $$ and 1.4$$\times $$ speedups, respectively. Similarly, it computes the same operation in $$\sim $$496 thousand cycles on a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller, achieving a factor-2.9 speedup when compared to the fastest Curve25519 implementation targeting the same platform. Second, we engineer a set of side-channel countermeasures taking advantage of Four$$\mathbb {Q}$$’s rich arithmetic and propose a secure implementation that offers protection against a wide range of sophisticated side-channel attacks. Finally, we perform a differential power analysis evaluation of our software running on an ARM Cortex-M4, and report that no leakage was detected with up to 10 million traces. These results demonstrate the potential of deploying Four$$\mathbb {Q}$$ on low-power applications such as protocols for IoT.