A Novel Cryptoprocessor Architecture for the McEliece Public-Key Cryptosystem

The McEliece public-key cryptosystem relies on the NP-hard decoding problem, and therefore, is regarded as a solution for postquantum cryptography. Though early known, this cryptosystem was not employed so far because of efficiency questions regarding performance and communication overhead. This paper presents a novel processor architecture as a high-performance platform to execute key generation, encryption, and decryption according to this cryptosystem. A prototype of this processor is realized on a reconfigurable device and tested via a dedicated software interface. A comparison with a similar software solution highlights the performance advantage of the proposed hardware solution.