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Rethinking modular multi-exponentiation in real-world applications

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Abstract

The importance of efficient multi-exponentiation algorithms in a large spectrum of cryptographic applications continues to grow. Previous literature on the subject pays attention exclusively on the minimization of the number of modular multiplications. However, a small reduction of the multiplicative complexity can be easily overshadowed by other figures of merit. In this article, we demonstrate that the most efficient algorithm for computing multi-exponentiation changes if considering execution time instead of number of multi-exponentiations. We focus our work on two algorithms that perform best under the number of multi-exponentiation metric and show that some side operations affect their theoretical ranking. We provide this analysis on different hardware, such as Intel Core and ARM CPUs and the two latest generations of Raspberry Pis, to show how the machine chosen affects the execution time of multi-exponentiation.

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Notes

  1. https://www.openssl.org.

  2. https://github.com/iotaledger/research-multi-exponentiation.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank some people that helped elaborating this paper. First, we would like to thank Prof. Paul Zimmermann from Loria, France, who took a lot of time to help us understand how multi-precision libraries work. Then, Colin Walter who clarified a lot of details on Montgomery reduction implementation. Thank you also to Wolfgang Welz from the IOTA Foundation for his engineering advises that helped us define the scope of this paper. Finally, thank you to Ilan Zajtmann for lending us some computation time on his Apple M1 computer to help us include cutting-edge technology in this survey.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IOTA Foundation, Berlin, Germany

    Vidal Attias & Luigi Vigneri

  2. University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

    Vassil Dimitrov

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  1. Vidal Attias
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  2. Luigi Vigneri
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  3. Vassil Dimitrov
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Correspondence to Vidal Attias.

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Attias, V., Vigneri, L. & Dimitrov, V. Rethinking modular multi-exponentiation in real-world applications. J Cryptogr Eng 13, 57–70 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13389-022-00287-w

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