Monash University researchers have helped develop a new technique to implement faster quantum-safe digital signatures, resulting in quicker and safer online communications.
The research was recently published in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. It discussed a faster way to implement Falcon, the post-quantum digital signature scheme, for GPUs.
“Falcon and other quantum-safe signature schemes are quite detailed and time-consuming algorithms to implement for GPUs,” Associate Professor Steinfeld said. Steinfeld co-authored the paper and works at Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology.
“Through this research, we have successfully developed new techniques to solve the unique challenges of efficiently implementing Falcon on GPUs, resulting in 20 times faster generation of quantum-secure digital signatures compared to current state-of-the-art CPU implementations.”
Researchers have been working on optimising Falcon’s practical performance since its recent introduction as a National Institute of Standards and Technology standard.
“Falcon is particularly hard to implement on GPUs compared to other NIST standardised signatures due to its special signing process,” said Associate Professor Wai-Kong Lee from Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman. “This work is the first attempt to fill the research gap and hopes to stimulate more significant breakthroughs in implementing Falcon.”
GPUs and computer networks use digital signatures to process and authenticate all types of digital transactions. Governments are moving to standardise computer networks to safeguard against attacks on quantum computers in the future.
“In recent years, with the increased use of computers for various activities, including e-commerce, consumption of all forms of media, and the use of artificial intelligence, there has been a rising demand for better-performing GPUs, which typically handle more complex computational processes,” said the CSIRO’s Dr Raymond Zhao.
“In the case of e-commerce website Alibaba, we see around 583,000 orders per second during its peak time, and online payments typically adopt digital signatures to secure the payments,” he said.
“Accelerated generation of digital signatures would positively impact all online transactions, especially for e-commerce transactions and Internet of Things because those applications need to process millions of digital signatures per second on the server side during the peak time.”
The research is a collaboration between researchers from Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology, CSIRO’s Data61, and South Korea’s Gachon University.
The Australian part of the research was supported in part by the ARC Discovery Project under Grant DP180102199 and Grant DP220101234. In South Korea, the research was funded partly by the Brain Pool Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) under Grant 2019H1D3A1A01102607, the Gachon University research fund under Grant GCU-202304050001, and the Circle Foundation research fund under Grant 2023 TCF Innovative Science Project-05.
