A Hardware Accelerator for Polynomial Multiplication Operation of CRYSTALS-KYBER PQC Scheme

Paper 2021/485

A Hardware Accelerator for Polynomial Multiplication Operation of CRYSTALS-KYBER PQC Scheme

Ferhat Yaman, Ahmet Can Mert, Erdinç Öztürk, and Erkay Savaş

Abstract

Polynomial multiplication is one of the most time-consuming operations utilized in lattice-based post-quantum cryptography (PQC) schemes. CRYSTALS-KYBER is a lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) and it was recently announced as one of the four finalists at round three in NIST's PQC Standardization. Therefore, efficient implementations of polynomial multiplication operation are crucial for high-performance CRYSTALS-KYBER applications. In this paper, we propose three different hardware architectures (lightweight, balanced, high-performance) that implement the NTT, Inverse NTT (INTT) and polynomial multiplication operations for the CRYSTALS-KYBER scheme. The proposed architectures include a unified butterfly structure for optimizing polynomial multiplication and can be utilized for accelerating the key generation, encryption and decryption operations of CRYSTALS-KYBER. Our high-performance hardware with 16 butterfly units shows up to 112×, 132× and 109× improved performance for NTT, INTT and polynomial multiplication, respectively, compared to the high-speed software implementations on Cortex-M4.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. 2021 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)
Keywords: CRYSTALS-KYBER PQC NTT Polynomial Multiplication Hardware
Contact author(s): ferhatyaman @ sabanciuniv edu
ahmetcanmert @ sabanciuniv edu
erdinco @ sabanciuniv edu
erkays @ sabanciuniv edu
History: 2021-04-16: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/485
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/485,
      author = {Ferhat Yaman and Ahmet Can Mert and Erdinç Öztürk and Erkay Savaş},
      title = {A Hardware Accelerator for Polynomial Multiplication Operation of {CRYSTALS}-{KYBER} {PQC} Scheme},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/485},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/485}
}