An Investigation of Methods to Improve Area and Performance of Hardware Implementations of a Lattice Based Cryptosystem

With continuing research into quantum computing, current public key cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC will become insecure. These algorithms are based on the difficulty of integer factorization or discrete logarithm problems, which are difficult to solve on classical computers but become easy with quantum computers. Because of this threat, government and industry are investigating new public key standards, based on mathematical assumptions that remain secure under quantum computing. This paper investigates methods of improving the area and performance of one of the proposed algorithms for key exchanges, "NewHope." We describe a pipelined FPGA implementation of NewHope512cpa which dramatically increases the throughput for a similar design area. Our pipelined encryption implementation achieves 652.2 Mbps and a 0.088 Mbps/LUT throughput-to-area (TPA) ratio, which are the best known results to date, and achieves an energy efficiency of 0.94 nJ/bit. This represents TPA and energy efficiency improvements of 10.05× and 8.58×, respectively, over a non-pipelined approach. Additionally, we investigate replacing the large SHAKE XOF (hash) function with a lightweight Trivium based PRNG, which reduces the area by 32% and improves energy efficiency by 30% for the pipelined encryption implementation, and which could be considered for future cipher specifications.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Beckwith, Luke Parkhurst

Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair

• Liu, Lingjia
• Diehl, William J.

Committee member dc:contributor.committeemember

• Ampadu, Paul K.

• Post Quantum Cryptography
• NewHope
• Field programmable gate arrays
• Cryptography
• Pipelined Architecture
• Trivium
• Random Number Generation
• Register Transfer Level Design
• NIST

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:27965

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/100798