Fast Implementation of Binary Field Multiplication on Arm Helium with Applications to Post-Quantum Signatures

• Eric Azevedo de Oliveira UNICAMP
• Décio Luiz Gazzoni Filho TII / UEL
• Felix Carvalho Rodrigues UNICAMP / UNIVESP
• Julio López UNICAMP

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbseg.2026.27074

Resumo

Polynomial multiplication over binary fields GF(2ⁿ) is a major bottleneck in post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, demanding constant-time implementations on constrained devices. This paper presents constant-time algorithms for multiplication and squaring in GF(2ⁿ), with n ∈ {128, 192, 256}, tailored for the Arm Cortex-M85 and applied to the AIMer and FAEST signature schemes. By leveraging the VMULLB and VMULLT carry-less multiplication instructions from the Helium MVE extension, we deliver vectorized routines integrated into the reference codebases of both schemes. Benchmarks on the Renesas EK-RA8M1 board show speedups of up to 1.35× for AIMer and 1.30× for FAEST-EM.

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