Bachelor thesis "Classic McEliece in Rust"
The asymmetric McEliece cryptosystem, although previously unpopular in the cryp- tographic community due to its large key size, has become an exciting candidate in post-quantum cryptography because the hardness assumption of the underlying cipher remains unaffected by quantum computer attacks. In 2016 the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) initiated the open post-quantum cryptography competition where the key-encapsulation mechanism classic McEliece is a round 3 candidate. The goal of this bachelor thesis is to understand the McEliece cryptosystem and port the classic McEliece implementation from the C programming language to the Rust programming language. Rust is a language that was developed with the focus on memory safety, specifically enabling safe low-level memory manipulation while at the same time offering multi-paradigm language features such as generics, pattern matching, iterators, and many more. In the course of this thesis, a Rust implementation of classic Mceliece was published as a crate (library) on the Rust community crate registry. The Rust implementation yields faster results than the C reference implementation in speed benchmarks.
Keywords: Post-quantum cryptography, Rust programming language, code-based cryptography, Classic McEliece, binary goppa codes
You can use make to build thesis.pdf and make clean to remove temporary files from the build process.
Requires the packages:
latexmkbibertexlive-binextratexlive-langgermantexlive-plaingenerictexlive-bibtexextra