High-Performance Accelerator for Post-Quantum Cryptography Using Crystals Dilithium with Area Optimization

The rise of quantum-capable adversaries has driven global efforts to standardize post-quantum cryptographic primitives. Once standardized, existing security protocols must efficiently integrate these schemes. This work presents an optimized implementation of CRYSTALS-Dilithium, NIST’s chosen post-quantum digital signature scheme. By leveraging parallelism, pre-computation, and efficient memory management, we achieve a compact design suitable for small Zynq FPGA devices. On the Zynq Ultrascale+ platform, our approach improves the Area×Time trade-off for KeyGen, Sign, and Verify by 36.7%, 35.4%, and 42.3%, respectively. Additionally, it reduces bit complexity by up to 91.2% and storage by 72.5% for signature generation at various security levels compared to conventional NTT-based methods.