Paper 2021/541

Hardware Deployment of Hybrid PQC

Reza Azarderakhsh, Rami El Khatib, Brian Koziel, and Brandon Langenberg

Abstract

In this work, we present a small architecture for quantum-safe hybrid key exchange targeting ECDH and SIKE. This is the first known hardware implementation of ECDH/SIKE-based hybrid key exchange in the literature. We propose new ECDH and EdDSA parameter sets defined over the SIKE primes. As a proof-of-concept, we evaluate SIKEX434, a hybrid PQC scheme composed of SIKEp434 and our proposed ECDH scheme X434 over a new, low-footprint architecture. Both schemes utilize the same 434-bit prime to save area. With only 1663 slices on a small Artix-7 device, our SIKE architecture can compute an entire hybrid key exchange in 320 ms. This is the smallest SIKE architecture in the literature. The hybrid SIKEX434 adds approximately 16% communication overhead and 10% latency overhead over SIKEp434. The additional overhead to support multiple primes indicates the need for new standardized ECC parameters for area-efficient designs in the future.