High-Throughput Post-Quantum Cryptographic System: CRYSTALS-Kyber with Computational Scheduling and Architecture Optimization

With the development of a quantum computer in the near future, classical public-key cryptography will face the challenge of being vulnerable to quantum algorithms, such as Shor’s algorithm. As communication technology advances rapidly, a great deal of personal information is being transmitted over the Internet. Based on our observation that the Kyber algorithm exhibits a significant number of idle cycles during execution when implemented following the conventional software procedure, this paper proposes a high-throughput scheduling for Kyber by parallelizing the SHA-3 function, the sampling algorithm, and the NTT computations to improve hardware utilization and reduce latency. We also introduce the 8-stage pipelined SHA-3 architecture and multi-mode polynomial arithmetic module to increase area efficiency. By also optimizing the hardware architecture of the various computational modules used by Kyber, according to the implementation result, an aggregate throughput of 877.192 kOPS in Kyber KEM can be achieved on TSMC 40 nm. In addition, our design not only achieves the highest throughput among existing studies but also improves the area and power efficiencies.