Paper 2021/1451

High-Performance Hardware Implementation of CRYSTALS-Dilithium

Luke Beckwith and Duc Tri Nguyen and Kris Gaj

Abstract

Many currently deployed public-key cryptosystems are based on the difficulty of the discrete logarithm and integer factorization problems. However, given an adequately sized quantum computer, these problems can be solved in polynomial time as a function of the key size. Due to the future threat of quantum computing to current cryptographic standards, alternative algorithms that remain secure under quantum computing are being evaluated for future use. One such algorithm is CRYSTALS-Dilithium, a lattice-based digital signature scheme, which is a finalist in the NIST Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) competition. As a part of this evaluation, high-performance implementations of these algorithms must be investigated. This work presents a high-performance implementation of CRYSTALS-Dilithium targeting FPGAs. In particular, we present a design that achieves the best latency for an FPGA implementation to date. We also compare our results with the most-relevant previous work on hardware implementations of NIST Round 3 post-quantum digital signature candidates.