Publication
A Hard Crystal - Implementing Dilithium on Reconfigurable Hardware
Georg Land; Pascal Sasdrich; Tim Güneysu
In: 20th Smart Card Research and Advanced Application Conference (CARDIS 2021), Hybrid Conference. Smart Card Research and Advanced Application Conference (CARDIS-2021), November 11-12, Lübeck, Germany, 2021.
Abstract
CRYSTALS-Dilithium as a lattice-based digital signature scheme has been selected as a finalist in the PQC standardization process of NIST. As part of this selection, a variety of software implementations have been evaluated regarding their performance and memory requirements for platforms like x86 or ARM Cortex-M4. In this work, we present a first set of FPGA implementations for the low-end Xilinx Artix-7 platform, evaluating the peculiarities of the scheme in hardware, reflecting all available round-3 parameter sets. As a key component in our analysis, we present results for a specifically adapted NTT core for the Dilithium cryptosystem, optimizing this component for an optimal LUT and FF utilization by efficient use of special purpose DSPs. Presenting our results, we aim to shed further light on the performance of lattice-based cryptography in low-cost and high-throughput configurations and their respective potential use-cases in practice.