A Performance Evaluation of Post-Quantum Cryptography in the Signal Protocol

Abstract: The Signal protocol can be considered state-of-the-art when it comes to secure messaging, but advances in quantum computing stress the importance of finding post-quantum resistant alternatives to its asymmetric cryptographic primitives. The aim is to determine whether existing post-quantum cryptography can be used as a drop-in replacement for the public-key cryptography currently used in the Signal protocol and what the performance trade-offs may be. An implementation of the Signal protocol using commutative supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman (CSIDH) key exchange operations in place of elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) is proposed. The benchmark results on a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 mobile device equipped with a 64-bit Samsung Exynos 9 (8895) octa-core CPU shows that it takes roughly 8 seconds to initialize a session using CSIDH-512 and over 40 seconds using CSIDH-1024, without platform specific optimization. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed implementation is the first post-quantum resistant Signal protocol implementation and the first evaluation of using CSIDH as a drop-in replacement for ECDH in a communication protocol.