A High Efficiency Hardware Design for the Post-Quantum KEM HQC

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Bibliographic Details
Title: A High Efficiency Hardware Design for the Post-Quantum KEM HQC
Authors: Antognazza, Francesco, Barenghi, Alessandro, Pelosi, Gerardo, Susella, Ruggero
Contributors: Antognazza, Francesco, Barenghi, Alessandro, Pelosi, Gerardo, Susella, Ruggero
Publisher Information: IEEE
Publication Year: 2024
Collection: RE.PUBLIC@POLIMI - Research Publications at Politecnico di Milano
Subject Terms: Post-quantum Cryptosystems, Code-based Cryptosystems, Hardware Security
Description: In this work, we present the first high-performance yet compact RTL design of the HQC cryptographic algorithm, fully compatible with the last specification revision of April 2023, which added implicit rejection calling. Our design improves on the state of the art of the specialized polynomial multipliers and Reed-Solomon/Reed-Muller decoder components, which take the largest share of the HQC computation time. Furthermore, we compare the efficiency of the sparse polynomial sampler proposed by the HQC team with different approaches proposed by the research community. We benchmarked our design employing the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA line, selected by the US NIST as the reference benchmarking platform for post-quantum cipher implementation. We report improvements in the latency for keygen, encapsulation, and decapsulation operations between 1.58× and 2.93×, and efficiency improvements (in terms of execution time per hardware resources) from 1.23× to 1.62×, with respect to the current state of the art RTL implementations of HQC components. When compared with the specification compliant HLS implementation provided by the HQC team, we achieve speedups between 7.41× and 10.67×, and improve the overall efficiency by a factor between 6.05× and 10.98×.
Document Type: conference object
Language: English
Relation: info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/isbn/979-8-3503-7394-3; info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/wos/WOS:001243879400041; ispartofbook:2024 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST); IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST); firstpage:431; lastpage:441; numberofpages:11; https://hdl.handle.net/11311/1267242
DOI: 10.1109/host55342.2024.10545409
Availability: https://hdl.handle.net/11311/1267242
https://doi.org/10.1109/host55342.2024.10545409
Rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
Accession Number: edsbas.4B735245
Database: BASE
Description
Abstract:In this work, we present the first high-performance yet compact RTL design of the HQC cryptographic algorithm, fully compatible with the last specification revision of April 2023, which added implicit rejection calling. Our design improves on the state of the art of the specialized polynomial multipliers and Reed-Solomon/Reed-Muller decoder components, which take the largest share of the HQC computation time. Furthermore, we compare the efficiency of the sparse polynomial sampler proposed by the HQC team with different approaches proposed by the research community. We benchmarked our design employing the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA line, selected by the US NIST as the reference benchmarking platform for post-quantum cipher implementation. We report improvements in the latency for keygen, encapsulation, and decapsulation operations between 1.58× and 2.93×, and efficiency improvements (in terms of execution time per hardware resources) from 1.23× to 1.62×, with respect to the current state of the art RTL implementations of HQC components. When compared with the specification compliant HLS implementation provided by the HQC team, we achieve speedups between 7.41× and 10.67×, and improve the overall efficiency by a factor between 6.05× and 10.98×.
DOI:10.1109/host55342.2024.10545409