A Configurable ML-KEM/Kyber Key-Encapsulation Hardware Accelerator Architecture

The development of quantum computers has created a need for new Post-Quantum cryptography (PQC) to address the potential threat to the current cryptography systems. The Module-Lattice-based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) – previously known as CRYSTALS-Kyber – is a lattice-based algorithm that offers smaller keys and high security. In this brief, we present a configurable hardware architecture that can perform key encapsulation mechanisms: key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation of ML-KEM/Kyber. The proposed configurable architecture includes a Memory-based Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) and its inverse (INTT) module to reduce the complexity of polynomial multiplication. By designing the NTT/INTT module to be configurable, resource usage is minimized. We implemented the proposed ML-KEM architecture on the Artix-7 FPGA platform. Compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches, we achieved an Area-Time Product (ATP) performance improvement of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.03\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> at security level 1, <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.10\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> at security level 3, and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.23\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> at security level 5.