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A High-Performance Hardware Implementation of the LESS Digital Signature Scheme

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Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQCrypto 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14154))

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Abstract

In 2022, NIST selected the first set of four post-quantum cryptography schemes for near-term standardization. Three of them - CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, and FALCON - belong to the lattice-based family and one - SPHINCS\(^+\) - to the hash-based family. NIST has also announced an “on-ramp” for new digital signature candidates to add greater diversity to the suite of new standards. One promising set of schemes - a subfamily of code-based cryptography - is based on the linear code equivalence problem. This well-studied problem can be used to design flexible and efficient digital signature schemes. One of these schemes, LESS, was submitted to the NIST standardization process in June 2023. In this work, we present a high-performance hardware implementation of LESS targeting Xilinx FPGAs. The obtained results are compared with those for the state-of-the-art hardware implementations of CRYSTALS-Dilithium, SPHINCS\(^+\), and FALCON.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.: CNS-1801512 and by the US Department of Commerce (NIST) under Grant No.: 70NANB18H218.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Luke Beckwith, Robert Wallace, Kamyar Mohajerani & Kris Gaj

  2. PQSecure Technologies, Boca Raton, FL, 33431, USA

    Luke Beckwith

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  1. Luke Beckwith
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  3. Kamyar Mohajerani
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Correspondence to Luke Beckwith .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Thomas Johansson

  2. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

    Daniel Smith-Tone

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Beckwith, L., Wallace, R., Mohajerani, K., Gaj, K. (2023). A High-Performance Hardware Implementation of the LESS Digital Signature Scheme. In: Johansson, T., Smith-Tone, D. (eds) Post-Quantum Cryptography. PQCrypto 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14154. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40003-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40003-2_3

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