Thomas Prest, our lead cryptography researcher will be speaking online at the 8th Asian Post-Quantum Cryptographic Forum. 15 July, 14:50.
The topic is ‘A Secure Fixed-Point Implementation of Falcon’.
Falcon is one of NIST’s top choices for post-quantum digital signatures because it boasts the smallest signature size available. However, its adoption has been held back by a major bottleneck: it relies heavily on complex floating-point math. This makes it incredibly difficult – and insecure – to deploy on smaller embedded devices and platforms that lack specialized hardware or are highly vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks.
A new breakthrough completely solves this portability crisis by shifting Falcon’s security math from relative to absolute error bounds, allowing it to run entirely on efficient fixed-point arithmetic. The results are a huge win for practical cryptography: this new implementation is 5x to 10x faster than previous software workarounds, while remaining fully compatible with standard, genuine Falcon keys. It bridges the gap between high security and real-world performance for constrained devices.
Find out more about the event on the website.