Accelerating the Development of NTRU Algorithm on Embedded Systems

The advent of quantum computers represents a serious threat to current public key cryptosystems. To face this problem the so-called Post-Quantum (PQ) cryptographic solutions are being developed, many of which have been presented to the competition launched by NIST to evaluate proposals of PQ cryptography for standardization and deployment. This paper addresses the implementation of the NTRU PQ cryptographic algorithm on embedded systems. Using a Python-based development framework to accelerate the design process, software-only and hybrid (HW/SW) implementations of NTRU are evaluated in terms of operation speed and resource consumption on a System-on-Chip (SoC). Results show that hardware implementation of critical operations in conjuction with a Python+C programming allows an increase in performance that ranges from 130 to 450 depending on the selected scenario to use the algorithm.