Super Acceleration of Dilithium in MPSoCs Critical Environments

Abstract

Digital signature is a key security technology for authenticating systems and devices, thus enabling the existence of wide collaborative environments. This is also true for safety-critical systems that are constrained by strict performance requirements. Such applications are usually implemented through Multi-processors System-on-Chip (MPSoC). The dawn of quantum computing represents a threat for current cryptography, including the digital signatures. In order to prepare for such an event, electronic systems must integrate quantum-secure (post-quantum) cryptography. Dilithium is one of the main alternatives for practical implementation of post-quantum signatures. While most of the attention has been given to the security analysis and single-core software implementation, the Dilithium MPSoC exploration for high performance has been neglected. To this end, this work presents two contributions. First, the design and exploration of optimized Dilithium multi-core implementations. Second, the deployment of Dilithium on real life MPSoCs used in automotive applications and operated with a commercial RTOS. Results show that Dilithium can be efficiently implemented and optimized on a multicore architecture, improving the performance up to 48% for key generation, 34% for signature and 42% for verification when compared to single core solutions.