ARMv8 SIKE: Optimized Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation on ARMv8 Processors

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems. I, Regular papers Vol. 66; no. 11; pp. 4209 - 4218
• Main Authors: Jalali, Amir, Azarderakhsh, Reza, Mozaffari Kermani, Mehran, Campagna, Matthew, Jao, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.11.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: ARM assembly; Assembly; Cryptography; Elliptic curves; Encapsulation; Fields (mathematics); finite field; isogeny-based cryptosystems; key encapsulation mechanism; Libraries; Performance enhancement; post-quantum cryptography; Processors; Program processors; Protocols
• ISSN: 1549-8328; 1558-0806
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSI.2019.2920869

In this paper, we present highly-optimized constant-time software libraries for supersingular isogeny key encapsulation (SIKE) protocol on ARMv8 processors. Our optimized hand-crafted assembly libraries provide the most efficient timing results on 64-bit ARM-powered devices. Moreover, the presented libraries can be integrated into any other cryptography primitives targeting the same finite field size. We design a new mixed implementation of field arithmetic on 64-bit ARM processors by exploiting the A64 and Advanced SIMD processing units working in parallel. Using these techniques, we are able to improve the performance of the entire protocol by the factor of 5\times compared to optimized C implementations on 64-bit ARM high-performance cores, providing 83-, 124-, and 159-bit quantum-security levels. Furthermore, we compare the performance of our proposed library with the previous highly-optimized ARMv8 assembly library available in the literature. The implementation results illustrate the overall 10% performance improvement in comparison with previous work, highlighting the benefit of using mixed implementation over relatively-large finite field size.