Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (Mar 2024)

ConvKyber: Unleashing the Power of AI Accelerators for Faster Kyber with Novel Iteration-based Approaches

  • Tian Zhou,
  • Fangyu Zheng,
  • Guang Fan,
  • Lipeng Wan,
  • Wenxu Tang,
  • Yixuan Song,
  • Yi Bian,
  • Jingqiang Lin

DOI
https://doi.org/10.46586/tches.v2024.i2.25-63
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2024, no. 2

Abstract

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The remarkable performance capabilities of AI accelerators offer promising opportunities for accelerating cryptographic algorithms, particularly in the context of lattice-based cryptography. However, current approaches to leveraging AI accelerators often remain at a rudimentary level of implementation, overlooking the intricate internal mechanisms of these devices. Consequently, a significant number of computational resources is underutilized. In this paper, we present a comprehensive exploration of NVIDIA Tensor Cores and introduce a novel framework tailored specifically for Kyber. Firstly, we propose two innovative approaches that efficiently break down Kyber’s NTT into iterative matrix multiplications, resulting in approximately a 75% reduction in costs compared to the state-of-the-art scanning-based methods. Secondly, by reversing the internal mechanisms, we precisely manipulate the internal resources of Tensor Cores using assembly-level code instead of inefficient standard interfaces, eliminating memory accesses and redundant function calls. Finally, building upon our highly optimized NTT, we provide a complete implementation for all parameter sets of Kyber. Our implementation surpasses the state-of-the-art Tensor Core based work, achieving remarkable speed-ups of 1.93x, 1.65x, 1.22x and 3.55x for polyvec_ntt, KeyGen, Enc and Dec in Kyber-1024, respectively. Even when considering execution latency, our throughput-oriented full Kyber implementation maintains an acceptable execution latency. For instance, the execution latency ranges from 1.02 to 5.68 milliseconds for Kyber-1024 on R3080 when achieving the peak throughput.

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