CRYSTALS-Dilithium post-quantum cyber-secure SoC for wired communications in critical systems

Critical systems in the energy industry and aerospace are the backbone of modern society and national defense. These systems are becoming heterogeneous computing and networking infrastructures composed of Edge located, Fog, and Cloud control devices. Strict coordination and reliable networking are required to orchestrate the tasks and actions controlled by multiple devices. The well-known Ethernet standard for inter and intra sub-system networking is evolving to Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). Regarding the security at the link level in this networking, the industry has selected MACsec as the technology to protect hard-real time traffic, in general and TSN, in particular.

The extensive application of TSN will intersect with the post-quantum attack landscape in the future. As a result, it becomes imperative to conduct research on security solutions capable of effectively addressing these emerging threats. A quantum attack represents a novel and significant threat to network security. And, to operate MACsec in a post-quantum scenario, it is necessary to analyze the cipher suites for symmetric and asymmetric cryptography and used in MACsec (standard IEEE 802.1AE) and MKA (IEEE 802.1X).

In the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization process, The National Institute of Standards and Technology has selected for public-key encryption and key-establishment algorithm CRYSTALS–KYBER. Additionally, the selected digital signature algorithms for standardization include CRYSTALS-Dilithium.

This work contributes with a novel concept-proof semiconductor implementation that fulfill the requirements in terms of power-consumption, resources utilization and PQC security level for Industrial IoT applications. The presented research analyzes the resources required by a high-performance CRYSTALS-Dilithium implementation on IIoT SoC devices. Firstly, the architecture and implementation of RTL-based CRYSTALS-Dilithium IP are presented and discussed. Secondly, a System-on-Chip semiconductor device composed of a RISC-V CPU subsystem and the CRYSTALS-Dilithium IP is developed in the scope of this research as a concept-prof to evaluate the viability of integrating PQC on resource-constrained devices for IIoT.