Area-Time Efficient Hardware Architecture for CRYSTALS-Kyber

Abstract

This paper presents a novel area-time efficient hardware architecture of the lattice-based CRYSTALS-Kyber, which has entered the third round of the post-quantum cryptography standardization competition hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. By developing a dual-path delay feedback number theoretic transform multiplier dedicating for Kyber parameter set and deploying this multiplier in the Kyber architecture, the key generation, encryption, and decryption operations are accelerated substantially. Furthermore, the proposed architecture offers the best value of area-time product in comparison with existing approaches. The implementation results on Xilinx Vivado targeted for Virtex-7 FPGA board demonstrate that the proposed Kyber cryptoprocessor completes encryption and decryption operations in approximately 57.5 μs at the highest frequency of 226 MHz. Furthermore, the area-time product value when using the proposed Kyber architecture is improved by at least twofold compared with existing architectures.

Keywords

• CRYSTALS-Kyber
• decryption
• encryption
• number theoretic transform (NTT)
• polynomial multiplier
• post-quantum cryptography