Paper 2024/130

HADES: Automated Hardware Design Exploration for Cryptographic Primitives

Fabian Buschkowski, Ruhr University Bochum
Georg Land, Intel (United States)
Niklas Höher, Ruhr University Bochum
Jan Richter-Brockmann, Ruhr University Bochum
Pascal Sasdrich, Ruhr University Bochum
Tim Güneysu, Ruhr University Bochum, German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence
Abstract

While formal constructions for cryptographic schemes have steadily evolved and emerged over the past decades, the design and implementation of efficient and secure hardware instances are still mostly manual, tedious, and intuition-driven processes. With the increasing complexity of modern cryptography, e.g., Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) schemes, and consideration of physical implementation attacks, e.g., Side-Channel Analysis (SCA), the design space often grows exorbitantly without developers being able to weigh all design options. This emphasizes the evident necessity for tool-assisted Design Space Exploration (DSE) for efficient and secure cryptographic hardware. To address this demand, we present the HADES framework. This tool systematically traverses the design space driven by security requirements, rapidly predicts user-defined performance metrics, e.g., area footprint or cycle-accurate latency, and instantiates the most suitable candidate in a synthesizable Hardware Description Language (HDL). We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework by applying our proof-of-concept implementation to a wide-ranging selection of symmetric and PQC schemes, including the ChaCha20 stream cipher and the PQC standard Kyber. Notably, for these schemes, we present the first hardware implementations featuring arbitrary-order masking.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published by the IACR in TCHES 2025
Keywords
Design AutomationDesign Space ExplorationHardware ImplementationsHigh-order MaskingPQCKyberDilithiumAESSPNARX
Contact author(s)
fabian buschkowski @ rub de
mail @ georg land
niklas hoeher @ rub de
jan richter-brockmann @ rub de
pascal sasdrich @ rub de
tim gueneysu @ rub de
History
2025-07-11: revised
2024-01-30: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/130
License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
CC BY-NC

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/130,
      author = {Fabian Buschkowski and Georg Land and Niklas Höher and Jan Richter-Brockmann and Pascal Sasdrich and Tim Güneysu},
      title = {{HADES}: Automated Hardware Design Exploration for Cryptographic Primitives},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/130},
      year = {2024},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/130}
}
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