Tittle: SOLMAE: Faster and simpler quantum-safe signature based on NTRU-lattices

Abstract: Designing cryptographically strong primitives like digital signatures and key encapsulation mechanisms is a complex challenge that requires the expertise of a group of skilled designers. These experts must possess a comprehensive understanding of known theoretical and implementation-based attacks while also anticipating potential future threats, particularly from emerging technologies like quantum computing. Our team, composed of top-level cryptographers from around the world, has focused on developing a long-term quantum-secure signature scheme based on NTRU lattices—a well-established concept within the cryptographic community for over two decades.

One significant outcome of this effort is Falcon, a finalist in the NIST PQC standardization project in 2023, alongside Dilithium and SPHINCS+. Falcon is recognized for its robust security, compact signatures, and efficient verification times, comparable to elliptic curve signatures. However, its implementation is complex and computationally intensive, leveraging the Fast Fourier Orthogonalization (FFO) technique.

To address these challenges, Espitau et al. introduced Mitaka, a scheme that simplifies the sampling procedure without sacrificing efficiency. Mitaka’s design leads to faster operations, maintaining compact signature sizes, and adding new features such as cost-effective masking and parallelizability. Further advancements were made with ANTRAG, an improved version of Mitaka, designed to meet all NIST security levels. The culmination of these efforts is SOLMAE, which combines the strengths of Falcon, Mitaka, and ANTRAG, offering enhanced performance while preserving security, particularly at NIST security levels I and V. This talk will delve into the details of SOLMAE, including practical performance evaluations.

Biography:

Kwangjo Kim received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electronic Engineering from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 1980 and 1983, and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Yokohama National University, Japan, in 1991. He was a Visiting Professor at MIT, USA, and UC San Diego, USA, in 2005, as well as at Khalifa University, UAE, in 2012. In 2013, he served as an education specialist at the Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia.

From 1979 to 1997, he served as a section head at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in Korea. He then became a full professor at the School of Computing at KAIST, Korea, where he taught from 1988 until his retirement in 2021.

He has held various leadership roles, including Korean representative to IFIP TC-11, honorary President of the Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology (KIISC), and a board member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) from 2000 to 2004. He chaired the Asiacrypt Steering Committee from 2005 to 2008 and served as KIISC president in 2009.

Prof. Kim became the first Korean Fellow of the IACR in 2017 and is a member of IEEE, ACM, IEICE, and the IACR Fellow Selection Committee. He was the general chair for CHES 2014, Asiacrypt 2020, and PQCrypto 2021 and served as editor-in-chief of the online journal Cryptography and as an editor for the Journal of Mathematical Cryptology.

Currently, he is an Emeritus Professor at KAIST’s School of Computing and president of the International Research Institute for Cyber Security (IRCS), a non-profit organization approved by the Korean government to enhance national cyber security capabilities in the civilian sector.

Prof. Kim was recognized on Stanford University’s 2023 World’s Top 2% Scientists list for his outstanding academic contributions.

He authored two books associated with AI for security entitled “Network Intrusion detection using deep learning: A feature learning approach” and “Privacy-preserving deep learning: A comprehensive survey” which were published by Springer in 2018 and 2021, respectively.