Hardware Accelerators for Digital Signature Algorithms Dilithium and FALCON

Digital signature algorithms are the foundation of many secure communication protocols, including those used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. While the current generation of signature schemes is secure against classical attacks, they are potentially vulnerable to attacks using quantum computers. Because of this threat, multiple new schemes have been developed and evaluated in recent years. From among these schemes, the National Institute of Standards and Technology standardized two and selected additional three for near-term standardization. For use in IoT, these schemes must be sufficiently efficient in terms of their public-key and signature sizes and the timing of major operations. In this paper, we analyze the choice between two primary schemes considered for extensive use in IoT, CRYSTALS-Dilithium and FALCON, from the point of view of developing efficient hardware accelerators supporting cryptographic operations performed by IoT clients and servers.