Efficient ASIC Architecture for Low Latency Classic McEliece Decoding

IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, vol. 2024, pp. 403–425

Abstract

Post-quantum cryptography addresses the increasing threat that quantum computing poses to modern communication systems. Among the available “quantum-resistant” systems, the Classic McEliece key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) is positioned as a conservative choice with strong security guarantees. Building upon the code-based Niederreiter cryptosystem, this KEM enables high performance encapsulation and decapsulation and is thus ideally suited for applications such as the acceleration of server workloads. However, until now, no ASIC architecture is available for low latency computation of Classic McEliece operations. Therefore, the present work targets the design, implementation and optimization of a tailored ASIC architecture for low latency Classic McEliece decoding. An efficient ASIC design is proposed, which was implemented and manufactured in a 22 nm FDSOI CMOS technology node. We also introduce a novel inversionless architecture for the computation of error-locator polynomials as well as a systolic array for combined syndrome computation and polynomial evaluation. With these approaches, the associated optimized architecture improves the latency of computing error-locator polynomials by 47% and the overall decoding latency by 27% compared to a state-of-the-art reference, while requiring only 25% of the area.

Authors 4

1. Daniel Fallnich Aachen

   IBM (Germany) · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany; now with IBM, Böblingen, Germany

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

   now with IBM, Böblingen, Germany

2. Christian Lanius Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Shutao Zhang Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

4. Tobias Gemmeke Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany