As a part of our effort to deploy quantum resistant cryptography, we’re comfortable to announce the launch of the primary quantum resilient FIDO2 safety key implementation as a part of OpenSK, our open supply safety key firmware. This open-source {hardware} optimized implementation makes use of a novel ECC/Dilithium hybrid signature schema that advantages from the safety of ECC in opposition to commonplace assaults and Dilithium’s resilience in opposition to quantum assaults. This schema was co-developed in partnership with the ETH Zürich and gained the ACNS safe cryptographic implementation workshop greatest paper.

Quantum processor

As progress towards sensible quantum computer systems is accelerating, getting ready for his or her creation is turning into a extra urgent situation as time passes. Particularly, commonplace public key cryptography which was designed to guard in opposition to conventional computer systems, will be unable to resist quantum assaults. Luckily, with the latest standardization of public key quantum resilient cryptography together with the Dilithium algorithm, we now have a transparent path to safe safety keys in opposition to quantum assaults.

Whereas quantum assaults are nonetheless within the distant future, deploying cryptography at Web scale is a large enterprise which is why doing it as early as doable is important. Particularly, for safety keys this course of is predicted to be gradual as customers should purchase new ones as soon as FIDO has standardized submit quantum cryptography resilient cryptography and this new commonplace is supported by main browser distributors.

Hybrid signature: Sturdy nesting with classical and PQC scheme

Our proposed implementation depends on a hybrid strategy that mixes the battle examined ECDSA signature algorithm and the lately standardized quantum resistant signature algorithm, Dilithium. In collaboration with ETH, we developed this novel hybrid signature schema that gives the perfect of each worlds. Counting on a hybrid signature is important because the safety of Dilithium and different lately standardized quantum resistant algorithms haven’t but stood the take a look at of time and up to date assaults on Rainbow (one other quantum resilient algorithm) reveal the necessity for warning. This cautiousness is especially warranted for safety keys as most can’t be upgraded – though we’re working towards it for OpenSK. The hybrid strategy can also be utilized in different post-quantum efforts like Chrome’s help for TLS.

On the technical facet, a big problem was to create a Dilithium implementation sufficiently small to run on safety keys’ constrained {hardware}. By cautious optimization, we have been in a position to develop a Rust reminiscence optimized implementation that solely required 20 KB of reminiscence, which was small enough sufficient. We additionally hung out guaranteeing that our implementation signature pace was properly throughout the anticipated safety keys specification. That stated, we imagine bettering signature pace additional by leveraging {hardware} acceleration would permit for keys to be extra responsive.

Transferring ahead, we hope  to see this implementation (or a variant of it), being standardized as a part of the FIDO2 key specification and supported by main internet browsers in order that customers’ credentials might be protected in opposition to quantum assaults. In case you are concerned with testing this algorithm or contributing to safety key analysis, head to our open supply implementation OpenSK.