Paper 2023/1038

PQC Cloudization: Rapid Prototyping of Scalable NTT/INTT Architecture to Accelerate Kyber

Abstract

The advent of quantum computers poses a serious challenge to the security of cloud infrastructures and services, as they can potentially break the existing public-key cryptosystems, such as Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). Even though the gap between today’s quantum computers and the threats they pose to current public-key cryptography is large, the cloud landscape should act proactively and initiate the transition to the post-quantum era as early as possible. To comply with that, the U.S. government issued a National Security Memorandum in May 2022 that mandated federal agencies to migrate to post-quantum cryptosystems (PQC) by 2035. To ensure the long-term security of cloud computing, it is imperative to develop and deploy PQC resistant to quantum attacks. A promising class of post-quantum cryptosystems is based on lattice problems, which require polynomial arithmetic. In this paper, we propose and implement a scalable number-theoretic transform (NTT) architecture that significantly enhances the performance of polynomial multiplication. Our proposed design exploits multi-levels of parallelism to accelerate the NTT computation on reconfigurable hardware. We use the high-level synthesis (HLS) method to implement our design, which allows us to describe the NTT algorithm in a high-level language and automatically generate optimized hardware code. HLS facilitates rapid prototyping and enables us to explore different design spaces and trade-offs on the hardware platforms. Our experimental results show that our design achieves 11$\times$ speedup compared to the state-of-the-art requiring only 14 clock cycles for an NTT computation over a polynomial of degree 256. To demonstrate the applicability of our design, we also present a coprocessor architecture for Kyber, a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) chosen by the NIST post-quantum standardization process, that utilizes our scalable NTT core.