Towards practical key exchange from ordinary isogeny graphs

Abstract: We revisit the ordinary isogeny-graph based cryptosystems of Couveignes and Rostovtsev-Stolbunov, long dismissed as impractical. We give algorithmic improvements that accelerate key exchange in this framework, and explore the problem of generating suitable system parameters for contemporary pre-and post-quantum security that take advantage of these new algorithms. We also prove the session-key security of this key exchange in the Canetti-Krawczyk model, and the IND-CPA security of the related public-key encryption scheme, under reasonable assumptions on the hardness of computing isogeny walks. Our systems admit efficient key-validation techniques that yield CCA-secure encryp-tion, thus providing an important step towards efficient post-quantum non-interactive key exchange (NIKE).