[Resource Topic] 2022/1183: Towards a Fast and Efficient Hardware Implementation of HQC

Welcome to the resource topic for 2022/1183

Title:
Towards a Fast and Efficient Hardware Implementation of HQC

Authors: Sanjay Deshpande, Mamuri Nawan, Kashif Nawaz, Jakub Szefer, Chuanqi Xu

Abstract:

This work presents a hardware design for constant-time implementation of the HQC (Hamming Quasi-Cyclic) code-based key encapsulation mechanism. HQC has been selected for the fourth-round of NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization process and this work presents first, hand-optimized design of HQC key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation written in Verilog targeting implementation on FPGAs. The three modules further share a common SHAKE256 hash module to reduce area overhead. All the hardware modules are parametrizable at compile time so that designs for the different security levels can be easily generated. The architecture of the hardware modules includes novel, dual clock domain design, allowing the common SHAKE module to run at slower clock speed compared to the rest of the design, while other faster modules run at their optimal clock rate. The design currently outperforms the other hardware designs for HQC, and many of the fourth-round Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization process, with one of the best time-area products as well. For the dual clock design targeting lowest security level, we show that the HQC design can perform key generation in 0.12ms, encapsulation in 0.30ms, and decapsulation in 0.43ms when synthesized for an Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA. The performance can be increased even further at the cost of resources by increasing the level of parallelism, e.g. by having parallel polynomial multiplication modules in the encrypt module, or including even more clock domains, one for each of the main modules. The presented design will further be made available under open-source license.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1183

See all topics related to this paper.

Feel free to post resources that are related to this paper below.

Example resources include: implementations, explanation materials, talks, slides, links to previous discussions on other websites.

For more information, see the rules for Resource Topics .