Hardware Accelerated FrodoKEM on RISC-V

Abstract

FrodoKEM is an alternative finalist in the currently running standardization process for post-quantum secure cryptography, initiated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It is based on the well studied plain Learning With Errors (LWE) problem, leading to a high confidence in security. Its conservative design approach, however, makes it less performant when compared to other lattice-based candidates. In this work, we assemble a RISC-V based HW/SW codesign of FrodoKEM to speed up its computation. Our design supports all three parameter sets of the NIST submission. Compared to plain SW implementations on RISC-V, our accelerated design achieves speedup factors of up to 8.13.