Designing a Scalable and Area-Efficient Hardware Accelerator Supporting Multiple PQC Schemes

Abstract

This study introduces a hardware accelerator to support various Post-Quantum Cryptosystem (PQC) schemes, addressing the quantum computing threat to cryptographic security. PQCs, while more secure, also bring significant computational demands, which are especially problematic for lightweight devices. Previous hardware accelerators are typically scheme-specific, which is inefficient given the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s multiple finalists. Our approach focuses on the shared operations among these schemes, allowing a single design to accelerate multiple candidate PQCs at the same time. This is further enhanced by allocating resources according to performance profiling results. Our compact, scalable hardware accelerator supports four of NIST PQC finalists, achieving an area efficiency of up to 81.85% compared to the current state-of-the-art multi-scheme accelerator while supporting twice as many schemes. The design demonstrates average throughput improvements ranging from 0.97x to 35.97x across the four schemes and their main operations, offering an efficient solution for implementing multiple PQC schemes within constrained hardware environments.