Design and Implementation of a Post-Quantum Group Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol With the LibOQS Library: A Comparative Performance Analysis From Classic McEliece, Kyber, NTRU, and Saber

Group authenticated key exchange protocols (GAKE) are cryptographic tools enabling a group of several users communicating through an insecure channel to securely establish a common shared high-entropy key. In the last years, the need to design cryptographic tools which provide security in the presence of attackers with access to quantum resources has become unquestionable; the field dealing with these types of protocols is usually referred to as Post-Quantum Cryptography. The U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) launched in 2017 an open call to find suitable post-quantum public-key algorithms for standardization. In this work, we design a GAKE that can be instantiated with any key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) that satisfies the strong security notion IND-CCA, matching NIST’s requirements for this primitive. We have implemented our GAKE with the four finalist KEMs from the NIST process: Classic McEliece, Kyber, NTRU, and Saber, making use of the open-source library LibOQS where these algorithms are provided. We have conducted a detailed comparative performance analysis of the resulting GAKE protocols, taking into account all the parameter sets proposed in the submissions. We have also made a performance analysis of all the involved building pieces, including the four finalist KEMs. Finally, we also compare our GAKE with a previous proposal implemented with Kyber.