Implementing CFS

Abstract

CFS is the first practical code-based signature scheme. In the present paper, we present the initial scheme and its evolutions, the attacks it had to face and the countermeasures applied.We compare the different algorithmic choices involved during the implementation of the scheme and aim to provide guidelines to this task. We will show that all things considered the system remains practical. Finally, we present a state-of-the-art software implementation of the signing primitive to prove our claim. For eighty bits of security our implementation produces a signature in 1.3 seconds on a single core of Intel Xeon W3670 at 3.20 GHz. Moreover the computation is easy to distribute and we can take full profit of multi-core processors reducing the signature time to a fraction of second in software. © Springer-Verlag 2012.