Towards CRYSTALS-Kyber VHDL implementation

Abstract

Kyber is one of the three finalists of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum cryptography competition. This article presents an optimized Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL)-based implementation of the main components of the Kyber scheme, namely Number-Theoretic Transform (NTT) and Keccak. We focus specifically on NTT, Keccak and their derivatives since they largely determine Kyber’s performance due to their wide involvement in each step of the scheme. Our high-speed implementation also takes into account the trade-off between the degree of parallelization and the resources utilization. The NTT component is more than 27% faster than the state-of-the-art implementations. Furthermore, the optimization helps the algorithm to achieve 1 572 839 NTT operations per second.