Hardware Architecture for the SHA-3 Family in Crystals-Kyber: Post-Quantum Cryptography

With the immediate advances in quantum computing, standard public key cryptosystems are expected to become obsolete. For this reason, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) emerges as a new area of research for developing cryptographic systems that are resistant to conventional and quantum attacks. It could thus replace traditional public-key cryptographic solutions. This work describes the design hardware implementation of one of the most critical components in the NIST-PQC standard, CRYSTALS-KYBER. The symmetric primitives used in CRYSTALS-KYBER: SHA3-256, SHA3-512, SHAKE-128, and SHAKE-256, all based on the Keccak permutation, are integrated as a parameterizable hardware module. The proposed design focuses on embedded systems with a constraint on resources and power consumption and is implemented on a Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays Artix-7. The efficiency and performance of the proposed architecture are compared in terms of area, frequency, and clock cycles with the state of the art.