FPGA Implementation of BIKE for Quantum-Resistant TLS

EasyChair Preprint no. 8760

Abstract

The recent advances in quantum computers impose the adoption of post-quantum cryptosystems into secure communication protocols. This work proposes two FPGA-based, client- and server-side hardware architectures to support the integration of the BIKE post-quantum KEM within TLS. Thanks to the parametric hardware design, the paper explores the best option between hardware and software implementations, given a set of available hardware resources and a realistic use-case scenario. The experimental evaluation comparing our client and server designs against the reference AVX2 and hardware implementations of BIKE highlighted two aspects. First, the proposed client and server architectures outperform the reference hardware implementation of BIKE by eight and four times, respectively. Second, the performance comparison between our client and server designs against the reference AVX2 implementation strongly depends on the available resource. Our solution is almost twice as fast as the AVX2 implementation while implemented on the Artix-7 200 FPGA, while it is up to six times slower when targeting smaller FPGAs, thus motivating a careful analysis of the available hardware resources and the optimization of the design’s parallelism before opting for hardware support.

Keyphrases: Bike, code-based cryptography, FPGA, Hardware Accelerators, post-quantum cryptography, QC-MDPC codes

@Booklet{EasyChair:8760,
  author = {Andrea Galimberti and Davide Galli and Gabriele Montanaro and William Fornaciari and Davide Zoni},
  title = {FPGA Implementation of BIKE for Quantum-Resistant TLS},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 8760},

  year = {EasyChair, 2022}}