Acceleration of a Classic McEliece Postquantum Cryptosystem With Cache Processing

Abstract

The NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization process is in its fourth round, with a first KEM standard based on LWE and three candidates based on ECCs. These primitives implementation are designed to be optimal on classical hardware architecture targets. However, emerging architectures with Processing In Memory, made to be multi-purpose contrary to cryptographic co-processors, have proven their efficiency in multiple use-cases and show better overall computational speed. In this paper, we show that the Classic McEliece performance can be improved on PIM architectures. Notably, the public key generation benefits of a 12.6x speed-up on architectures with bit-line operations. We also describe the open-source RISC-V simulator specifically developed for our experiments, including both in-cache and vectored operations. We discuss how these architecture changes may open the possibility of redesigning primitives or parameter sets for better efficiency.