NSF-DFG: SaTC: CORE: Small: A Unified Hardware Design for the USA and German Post-Quantum Standards

Encryption services are crucial because they ensure the confidentiality and security of data by transforming it into a secure format that can only be decoded by authorized parties, thereby protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access and cyber threats. Custom hardware design for encryption services is useful because it provides specialized, high-performance and low-energy solutions tailored to specific security needs, significantly enhancing data protection and processing capabilities compared to general-purpose hardware.

This project develops custom hardware that can efficiently support multiple encryption algorithms. The novelties of this project are designing unified arithmetic functions and hardware units to support the operational and security needs of multiple algorithms. This project strengthens research collaborations and cryptography adoption across the United States and Germany and attracts underrepresented demographics to hardware security research.

This project develops a unified custom hardware design to efficiently execute post-quantum cryptography algorithms. To that end, the research team designs new hardware to jointly support critical computational blocks including arithmetic units, cryptographic primitives, and algorithm-specific steps such as sampling, encoding, and compressing. Moreover, the project explores new potential side-channel vulnerabilities of such hardware that can leak information and develops effective countermeasures using randomization techniques in hardware.

The research team organizes a session at an international conference for women in applied cryptography and integrates the research findings into graduate and undergraduate curricula to help train the next generation STEM researchers and practitioners with the necessary skills in hardware security.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.