rust-sike is a Rust implementation of the SIKE isogeny-based key encapsulation suite (SIKE 1), a post-quantum candidate submitted to the NIST standardization process 2.

Why rust-sike?

The SIKE submission already comes with reference implementations, including optimised versions for different platforms. Additional implementations by Microsoft and Cloudflare are available. All these libraries are written in C, with occasional platform-specific assembly instructions, which allows them to reach maximum performance. At the time of writing these implementations match an older version of the SIKE specification.

rust-sike is concerned with providing high correctness guarantees: adherence to the SIKE specification, memory and type safety, and reproducibility across platforms. Extensive testing and documentation is desired. Performance matters but is a longer-term concern.

Status

Supported features and algorithms

• Key encapsulation mechanism (KEM)
• Public-key encryption (PKE)
• All the parameters described in the NIST submission: p434, p503, p610, and p751.
• Optimised tree-traversal strategies

The updated specification (17 april 2019) is used as a basis for implementation.

Unsupported features and caveats

• Key compression and decompression are currently not supported (future work)
• The implementation is not guaranteed to be constant time
• The implementation is not no_std compatible (for non-essential reasons)

References and documentation

• https://sike.org/
• https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/Post-Quantum-Cryptography