Dual Isogenies and Their Application to Public-key Compression for Isogeny-based Cryptography

The isogeny-based protocols SIDH and SIKE have received much attention for being post-quantum key agreement candidates that retain relatively small keys. A recent line of work has proposed and further improved compression of public keys, leading to the inclusion of public-key compression in the SIKE proposal for Round 2 of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization effort. We show how to employ the dual isogeny to significantly increase performance of compression techniques, reducing their overhead from 160–182% to 77–86% for Alice’s key generation and from 98–104% to 59–61% for Bob’s across different SIDH parameter sets. For SIKE, we reduce the overhead of (1) key generation from 140–153% to 61–74%, (2) key encapsulation from 67–90% to 38–57%, and (3) decapsulation from 59–65% to 34–39%. This is mostly achieved by speeding up the pairing computations, which has until now been the main bottleneck, but we also improve (deterministic) basis generation.