Towards Automating Cryptographic Hardware Implementations: a Case Study of HQC

Carlos Aguilar-Melchor; Jean-Christophe Deneuville; Arnaud Dion; James Howe; Romain Malmain; Vincent Migliore; Mamuri Nawan; Kashif Nawaz

Paper 2022/1425

Towards Automating Cryptographic Hardware Implementations: a Case Study of HQC

Carlos Aguilar-Melchor, SandboxAQ, Palo Alto, USA

Jean-Christophe Deneuville, ENAC, University of Toulouse, France

Arnaud Dion, ISAE-SupAero, University of Toulouse, France

James Howe, SandboxAQ, Palo Alto, USA

Romain Malmain, EURECOM, France

Vincent Migliore, INSA/LAAS-CNRS, University of Toulouse, France

Mamuri Nawan, Cryptography Research Centre, Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Kashif Nawaz

, Cryptography Research Centre, Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Abstract

While hardware implementations allow the production of highly efficient and performance oriented designs, exploiting features such as parallelization, their longer time to code and implement often bottlenecks rapid prototyping. On the other hand, high-level synthesis (HLS) tools allow for faster experimentation of software code to a hardware platform while demonstrating a reasonable extrapolation of the expected hardware behavior. In this work, we attempt to show a rapid, fast prototyping of the well known HQC algorithm, using HLS, and show how with a modification of certain parameters, varying degrees of comparable results can be obtained. These results, in turn, could be used as a guide for HDL-RTL developers to enhance their designs and better prototyping time in the future. Additionally, we also demonstrate that it is possible to benefit from HQC's versatility; by achieving a low hardware footprint whilst also maintaining good performances, even on low-cost FPGA devices, which we demonstrate on the well known Artix-7 xc7a100t-ftg256-1.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: hqc kem pqc hls
Contact author(s): carlos aguilar @ sandboxaq com
jean-christophe deneuville @ enac fr
arnaud dion @ isae-supaero fr
james howe @ sandboxaq com
romain malmain @ eurecom fr
vincent migliore @ laas fr
mamuri @ tii ae
kashif nawaz @ tii ae
History: 2022-10-24: approved; 2022-10-20: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2022/1425
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/1425,
      author = {Carlos Aguilar-Melchor and Jean-Christophe Deneuville and Arnaud Dion and James Howe and Romain Malmain and Vincent Migliore and Mamuri Nawan and Kashif Nawaz},
      title = {Towards Automating Cryptographic Hardware Implementations: a Case Study of HQC},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/1425},
      year = {2022},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1425}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1425}
}