New Directions for NewHope: Improving Performance of Post-Quantum Cryptography through Algorithm-level Pipelining

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 implementation of NewHope512cpa which dramatically increases the throughput for a similar design area. Our pipelined encryption implementation achieves 652.2 Mbps and 0.088 Mbps/LUT throughput-to-area (TPA) ratio, which are the best known results to date, and achieves an energy efficiency of 1.35 nJ/bit. This represents TPA and energy efficiency improvements of 10.05× and 8.58×, respectively, over a non-pipelined approach. Additionally, we propose replacing the large SHAKE XOF function with a lightweight Trivium based PRNG, which reduces the area by 32% and improves energy efficiency by 30%, and which could be considered for future cipher specifications.