Towards Lightweight Identity-Based Encryption for the Post-Quantum-Secure Internet of Things

Tim Güneysu1 and Tobias Oder2
1University of Bremen & DFKI, 2Ruhr-Universität Bochum


Abstract

Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) was introduced as an elegant concept for secure data exchange due to its simplified key management by specifically addressing the asymmetric key distribution problems in multi-user scenarios. In particular in context of ad-hoc network connections as for the emerging Internet of Things, the simple key discovery procedures provided by IBE are very beneficial for many different use-cases. In this work we demonstrate for the first time that IBE has become practical even for a range of embedded devices that are populated with low-cost ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers or reconfigurable hardware components. More precisely, we adopt the IBE scheme proposed by Ducas et al. at ASIACRYPT 2014 based on the RLWE problem for which we provide implementation results for two security levels on the aforementioned embedded platforms. We give evidence that the implementations of the basic scheme are efficient, as for a security level of 80 bits it requires 103 ms and 36 ms for encryption and decryption, respectively, on the smallest ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller.