Comparison of RISC-V and transport triggered architectures for a postquantum cryptography application

Abstract

Cryptography is one of the basic phenomena of security systems. However, some of the widely used public-key cryptography algorithms can be broken by using quantum computers. Therefore, many postquantum cryptography algorithms are proposed in recent years to handle this issue. NTRU (Nth degree truncated polynomial ring units) is one of the most important of these quantum-safe algorithms. Besides the importance of cryptography algorithms, the architecture where they are implemented is also essential. In this study, we developed an NTRU public key cryptosystem application and designed several processors to compare them in many aspects. We address two different architectures in this work. The RISC-V (reduced instruction set computer-V) is chosen as it is the most lately version of classical RISC architecture. As competitor to this, we preferred transport triggered architecture (TTA) which offers high level customization and scalability. Details of all different implementations and the test results obtained with them are shared and discussed.