Hardware acceleration for high-volume operations of CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium

Abstract

Many high-demand digital services need to perform several cryptographic operations, such as key exchange or security credentialing, in a concise amount of time. In turn, the security of some of these cryptographic schemes is threatened by advances in quantum computing, as quantum computer could break their security in the near future. Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is an emerging field that studies cryptographic algorithms that resist such attacks. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected the CRYSTALS-Kyber Key Encapsulation Mechanism and the CRYSTALSDilithium Digital Signature algorithm as primary PQC standards. In this paper, we present FPGA-based hardware accelerators for high-volume operations of both schemes. We apply High-Level Synthesis (HLS) for hardware optimization, leveraging a batch processing approach to maximize the memory throughput, and applying custom HLS logic to specific algorithmic components. Using reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), we show that our hardware accelerators achieve speedups between 3x and 9x over software baseline implementations, even over ones leveraging CPU vector architectures. Furthermore, the methods used in this study can also be extended to the new CRYSTALS-based NIST FIPS drafts, ML-KEM and ML-DSA, with similar acceleration results.This work was part of the project (ISOLDE), funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR under Grant No. PCI2023-143372, and the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme under project Chips Joint Undertaking (JU) under Grant No. 101112274. At the same time, this work has been partially supported by the European HiPEAC Network of Excellence, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 (contract PID2019-107255GB-C21), and by the Government of Catalonia (contract 2021-SGR-763). X. Carril has the support of the predoctoral programme AGAUR-FI grants (2024 FI-1 00520) Joan Oró from the Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Department of Research and Universities of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the European Social Fund Plus. J. Ribes-González and O. Farràs are supported by grant 2021-SGR-00115 from the Government of Catalonia, by the project HERMES, funded by INCIBE and by the European Union NextGeneration EU/PRTR, and the project ACITHEC PID2021-124928NB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. C. Hernandez was supported by “Ramón y Cajal” fellowship No. RYC2020-030685-I. V. Kostalabros was supported by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) of the Government of Catalonia under “Ajuts per a la contractació de personal investigador novell” fellowship No. 2019FI B01274.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft