Uniform instruction set extensions for multiplications in contemporary and post-quantum cryptography

Abstract

Hybrid key encapsulation is in the process of becoming the de-facto standard for integration of post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Supporting two cryptographic primitives is a challenging task for constrained embedded systems. Both contemporary cryptography based on elliptic curves or RSA and PQC based on lattices require costly multiplications. Recent works have shown how to implement lattice-based cryptography on big-integer coprocessors. We propose a novel hardware design that natively supports the multiplication of polynomials and big integers, integrate it into a RISC-V core, and extend the RISC-V ISA accordingly. We provide an implementation of Saber and X25519 to demonstrate that both lattice- and elliptic-curve-based cryptography benefits from our extension. Our implementation requires only intermediate logic overhead, while significantly outperforming optimized ARM Cortex M4 implementations, other hardware/software codesigns, and designs that rely on contemporary accelerators.