ACIM-QMM: Efficient Analog Computing-in-Memory Accelerator for QC-MDPC McEliece Cryptosystem

Quasi-cyclic moderate density parity-check McEliece (QMM) cryptosystem is designed to mitigate the security threat posed by quantum computers, and is considered to be a promising candidate for post-quantum cryptography (PQC). However, the growing requirement of data encryption pose severe challenges for QMM implementation in terms of latency and hardware overhead. In this work, we firstly propose ACIM-QMM, an analog computing-in-memory (CIM) accelerator design for QMM cryptosystem. The use of analog circuits and CIM enables the design to efficiently generate key and encrypt ciphertext while breaking the performance bottleneck constrained by digital computing paradigm in PQC. In the experiment, ACIM-QMM can work in low relative error, and it can achieve $31.4 \times \sim 288.1 \times$ speedup compared with SOTA hardware of QMM cryptosystem. Furthermore, the results indicate that ACIM-QMM can achieve a maximum of $3.12 \times$ area efficiency and $20.32 \times$ energy efficiency compared to other PQC hardware for 256-bit security.