Reliable Architectures for Composite-Field-Oriented Constructions of McEliece Post-Quantum Cryptography on FPGA

Code-based cryptography based on binary Goppa codes is a promising solution for thwarting attacks based on quantum computers. The McEliece cryptosystem is a code-based public-key cryptosystem which is believed to be resistant against quantum attacks. In fact, it is successfully advanced to the second round of the post-quantum cryptography standardization competition early 2019. Due to its very large key size, different variants of binary Goppa codes have been proposed. Nevertheless, research has shown that such codes can be thwarted through the injection of faults, causing erroneous outputs. In this work, we present countermeasures for the implementation of different composite field arithmetic units used in the McEliece cryptosystem. The proposed architectures use overhead-aware and tailored signatures. We apply these error detection signatures to the McEliece cryptosystem and perform field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementations to show the feasibility of adopting the proposed schemes. We benchmark the overhead and performance degradation of the proposed approaches and show their suitability for constrained embedded systems.