Implementation of the Rainbow signature scheme on SoC FPGA

Abstract

Thanks to the research progress, quantum computers are slowly becoming a reality and some companies already have their working prototypes. While this is great news for some, it also means that some of the encryption algorithms used today will be rendered unsafe and obsolete. Due to this fact, NIST (US National Institute of Standards and Technology) has been running a standardization process for quantum-resistant key exchange algorithms and digital signatures. One of these is Rainbow—a signature scheme based on the fact that solving a set of random multivariate quadratic system is an NP-hard problem. This work aims to develop an AXI-connected accelerator for the Rainbow signature scheme, specifically the Ia variant. The accelerator is highly parameterizable, allowing to choose the data bus width, directly affecting the FPGA area used. It is also possible to swap components to use the design for other variants of Rainbow. This allows for a comprehensive experimental evaluation of our design. The developed accelerator provides significant speedup compared to CPU-based computation. This paper includes detailed documentation of the design as well as performance and resource utilisation evaluation.