McBits revisited

Abstract

This paper presents a constant-time fast implementation for a high-security code-based encryption system. The implementation is based on the “McBits” paper by Bernstein, Chou, and Schwabe in 2013: we use the same FFT algorithms for root finding and syndrome computation, similar algorithms for secret permutation, and bitslicing for low-level operations. As opposed to McBits, where a high decryption throughput is achieved by running many decryption operations in parallel, we take a different approach to exploit the internal parallelism in one decryption operation for the use of more applications. As the result, we manage to achieve a slightly better decryption throughput at a much higher security level than McBits. As a minor contribution, we also present a constant-time implementation for encryption and key-pair generation, with similar techniques used for decryption.