Paper 2026/1078

Post-Quantum HAWK Signature Acceleration with RISC-V-Based Hardware-Software Co-Design

Abstract

Advances in quantum computing technology have motivated the development of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms. HAWK is a new post-quantum digital signature scheme and the only lattice-based candidate selected for Round 3 of the "Additional Digital Signatures" phase of the NIST PQC Standardization process. HAWK offers compact key and signature sizes compared to NIST standard ML-DSA (Dilithium), and its simple design avoids the use of floating-point arithmetic unlike NIST standard FN-DSA (FALCON). This makes HAWK very well suited for resource-constrained applications. We perform software runtime profiling of HAWK signature computation and verification on a resource-efficient Vex RISC-V processor core, and identify Keccak permutations and polynomial transformations as the most computationally expensive functions. In this work, we demonstrate light-weight hardware-software co-design of HAWK with these operations accelerated using Vex RISC-V Custom Function Units and accompanying custom instructions. We present multiple design variants with different degrees of acceleration, and our best design achieves $\approx 3 \times$ speedup and $\approx 40\%$ reduction in area-time-product compared to the baseline when implemented on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA.