Paper 2021/714

CARiMoL: A Configurable Hardware Accelerator for Ringand Module Lattice-Based Post-Quantum Cryptography

Afifa Ishtiaq, Dr. Muhammad Shafique, and Dr. Osman Hassan

Abstract

Abstract—CARiMoL is a novel run-time Configurable Hardware Accelerator for Ring and Module Lattice-based postquantum cryptography. It’s flexible design can be configured to key-pair generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation for NewHope and CRYSTALS-Kyber schemes using same hardware. CARiMoL offers run-time configurability for multiple security levels of NewHope and CRYSTALS-Kyber schemes, supporting both Chosen-Plaintext Attack (CPA) and Chosen-Ciphertext Attack (CCA) secure implementations. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first systematically designed full scale hardware accelerator for CCA-complaint multiple LBC schemes that supports run-time reconfigurability without the use of processor such as ARM Cortex series or soft core such as popular RISC-V processors. CARiMol performs logic sequencing on runtime and eliminates the cycle overhead associated with fetch and decode instructions. For the simultaneous use of Ring-LWE and Module-LWE, CARiMoL’s single hardware accelerator has 7x less area overhead as compared to combined standalone design of these schemes. CARiMoL exploits parallelism and extensive resource sharing among the different LBC schemes to achieve high performance and efficiency. Despite its reconfigurability, CARiMoL offers substantial speedup compared to the state-ofthe- art, i.e., 9x over NewHope-1024, 10x over NewHope-512, 17x over CRYSTALS-Kyber-1024, and 18x over CRYSTALSKyber-512.