Exploring Energy Efficient Quantum-resistant Signal Processing Using Array Processors

Abstract

Quantum computers threaten to break public-key cryptography schemes such as DSA and ECDSA in polynomial time, which poses an imminent threat to secure signal processing. Ring learning with error (RLWE) lattice-based cryptography (LBC) is one of the most promising families of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) schemes in terms of efficiency and versatility. Two conventional methods to compute polynomial multiplication, the most compute-intensive routine in the RLWE schemes, are convolutions and Number Theoretic Transform (NTT).In this work, we explore the energy efficiency of polynomial multiplier using systolic architecture for the first time. As an early exploration, we design two high-throughput systolic array polynomial multipliers, including NTT-based and convolution-based, and compare them to our low-cost sequential (non-systolic) NTT-based multiplier. Our sequential NTT-based multiplier achieves 3x speedup over the state-of-the-art FGPA implementation of the polynomial multiplier in the NewHope-Simple key exchange mechanism on a low-cost Artix7 FPGA. When synthesized on a Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA, the NTT-based systolic and convolution-based systolic designs achieve on average 1.7x and 7.5x speedup over our sequential NTT-based multiplier respectively, which can lead to generating over 2x more signatures per second by CRYSTALS-Dilithium, a PQC digital signature scheme. These explorations help designers select the right PQC implementations for making future signal processing applications quantum-resistant.