FPGA Implementation of a Recently Published Signature Scheme

An algorithm producing cryptographic digital signatures less than 100 bits long with a security level matching nowadays standards has been recently proposed by Courtois, Finiasz, and Sendrier. This scheme is based on error correcting codes and consists in generating a large number of instances of a decoding problem until one of them is solved (about 9!=362880 attempts are needed). A careful software implementation requires more than one minute on a 2GHz Pentium 4 for signing. We propose a first hardware architecture which allows to sign a document in 0.86 second on an XCV300E-7 FPGA, hence making the algorithm practical.