Challenges and Rewards of Implementing and Benchmarking Post-Quantum Cryptography in Hardware

Practical quantum computers have been recently selected as one of 10 breakthrough technologies of 2017 by the MIT Technology Review. Although various fields of human activity, such as chemistry, medicine, and materials science, are likely to be dramatically affected by practical quantum computers, the most likely immediate impact will take place in the area of cryptography and cyber security. As a result of this potential threat, a new field of science has emerged, called Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). PQC is devoted to the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms that are resistant against any known attacks using quantum computers, but by themselves can be implemented using classical computing platforms, based on traditional modern semiconductor technologies. In this paper, we provide an overview and motivation for the PQC, NIST Standardization Effort, cryptographic competitions, and hardware benchmarking of candidates in cryptographic contests. Five major families of PQC schemes, code-, hash-, isogeny-, lattice-, and multivariate-based, are shortly introduced. The challenges of fair and comprehensive hardware benchmarking of PQC submissions are highlighted, together with the possible ways of overcoming these difficulties, such as the use of a common API, development packages, specialized libraries, and high-level synthesis.