SaTC: CORE: Small: Secure and Efficient Solutions for Post-Quantum Cryptography for Codes with Compact Representations

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Current public-key cryptography is based on well-known problems from the area of mathematics called Number Theory. These problems are vulnerable to attacks able to exploit the superior computational power of Quantum computers (such as Shor's algorithm). Small Quantum computers are already a reality, and the cryptographic community is currently hard at work to design the new cryptographic standards which will become actual once sufficiently large Quantum computers finally become available, making current cryptographic solutions obsolete. Code-based cryptography is one of the most accredited candidates to provide secure cryptographic primitives in the Post-Quantum era. In this project, we seek to create efficient and long-term secure cryptographic primitives from code-based cryptography. The project's novelties are the investigation, development, and deployment of techniques to obtain code-based cryptosystems featuring efficient performance and small public keys. The project's impacts are a substantial contribution to the standardization effort led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as well as a boost of the US and Israeli footprint in the area of post-quantum cryptography.The team of researchers, composed of a US investigator and an Israeli counterpart, proposes to employ a recent approach based on so-called Reproducible Codes to shorten the key size of cryptosystems based on codes defined by a sparse parity-check matrix. These include two of the current candidates to NIST's standardization effort, both of which have been admitted to the second round of the competition. Furthermore, the investigators seek to incorporate techniques to reduce the decoding-failure rate of such cryptosystems, in order to design schemes that allow the usage of static, long-term keys. Finally, the team plans to produce efficient and secure implementations for all the primitives investigated, which will safeguard against side-channel attacks and other physical and engineering attacksThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.