[Resource Topic] 2024/367: Accelerating SLH-DSA by Two Orders of Magnitude with a Single Hash Unit

Welcome to the resource topic for 2024/367

Title:
Accelerating SLH-DSA by Two Orders of Magnitude with a Single Hash Unit

Authors: Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen

Abstract:

We report on efficient and secure hardware implementation techniques for the FIPS 205 SLH-DSA Hash-Based Signature Standard. SLotH supports all 12 parameter sets of SLH-DSA. The configurable architecture contains Keccak/SHAKE, SHA2-256, and SHA2-512 cores, and can protect secret key material with side-channel secure PRF and Winternitz chains. We demonstrate that very significant performance gains can be obtained from hardware features that facilitate hash padding formats and iterative hashing specific to SLH-DSA. These features make SLH-DSA on SLotH many times faster compared to similarly-sized general-purpose hash accelerators. A small RISC-V control core executes the drivers, as is typical in RoT systems such as OpenTitan or Caliptra.

Compared to unaccelerated microcontroller implementations, the performance of SLotH’s SHAKE variants is up to 300\times faster; signature generation with 128f parameter set is is 4,903,978 cycles, while signature verification with 128s parameter set is only 179,603 cycles. The SLH-DSA-SHA2 parameter sets have approximately half of the speed. We observe that the signature verification performance of SLH-DSA’s ``s’’ parameter sets is generally better than that of accelerated ECDSA or Dilithium on similarly-sized RoT targets. The area of the full SLotH system is small, from 63 kGE (SHA2, Cat 1 only) to 155 kGe (all parameter sets). Keccak Threshold Implementation adds another 130 kGE.

We provide sensitivity analysis of SLH-DSA in relation to side-channel leakage. We show experimentally that an SLH-DSA implementation with CPU hashing will rapidly leak the SK.seed master key. We perform a 100,000-trace TVLA leakage assessment with a protected SLotH unit.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/367

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 .