Compact and Efficient KEMs over NTRU Lattices

Abstract

The NTRU lattice is a promising candidate to construct practical cryptosystems, in particular key encapsulation mechanism (KEM), resistant to quantum computing attacks. Nevertheless, there are still some inherent obstacles to NTRU-based KEM schemes in having integrated performance, taking security, bandwidth, error probability, and computational efficiency \emph{as a whole}, that is as good as and even better than their \{R,M\}LWE-based counterparts. In this work, we solve this problem by presenting a new family of NTRU-based KEM schemes, referred to as CTRU and CNTR. By bridging low-dimensional lattice codes and high-dimensional NTRU-lattice-based cryptography with careful design and analysis, to the best of our knowledge CTRU and CNTR are the first NTRU-based KEM schemes with scalable ciphertext compression via only one \emph{single} ciphertext polynomial, and are the first that could outperform \{R,M\}LWE-based KEM schemes in integrated performance. For instance, compared to Kyber that is currently the only standardized KEM by NIST, on the recommended parameter set CNTR-768 has about $12\%$ smaller ciphertext size while encapsulating 384-bit keys compared to the fixed 256-bit key size of Kyber, security strengthened by $(8,7)$ bits for classical and quantum security respectively, and significantly lower error probability ($2^{-230}$ of CNTR-768 vs. $2^{-164}$ of Kyber-768). In comparison with the state-of-the-art AVX2 implementation of Kyber-768, CNTR-768 is faster by 1.9X in KeyGen, 2.6X in Encaps, and 1.2X in Decaps, respectively. When compared to the NIST Round 3 finalist NTRU-HRSS, our CNTR-768 has about $15\%$ smaller ciphertext size, and the security is strengthened by $(55,49)$ bits for classical and quantum security respectively. As for the AVX2 implementation, CNTR-768 is faster than NTRU-HRSS by 19X in KeyGen, 2.3X in Encaps, and 1.6X in Decaps, respectively.