Falcon/Kyber and Dilithium/Kyber network stack on Nvidia’s data processing unit platform

Abstract

Commercially available quantum computers are expected to reshape the world in the near future. They are said to break conventional cryptographic security mechanisms that are deeply embedded in our today’s communication. Symmetric cryptography, such as AES, will withstand quantum attacks as long as the key sizes are doubled compared to today’s key lengths. Asymmetric cryptographic procedures, e.g. RSA, however are broken. It is therefore necessary to change the way we assure our privacy by adopting and moving towards post-quantum cryptography (PQC) principles. In this work, we benchmark three PQC algorithms, Falcon, Dilithium, and Kyber. Moreover, we present an implementation of a PQC stack consisting of the algorithms Dilithium/Kyber and Falcon/Kyber which use hardware accelerators for some key functions and evaluate their performance and resource utilization. Regarding a classic server-client model, the computational load of the Dilithium/Kyber stack is distributed more equally among server and client. The stack Falcon/Kyber biases the computational challenges towards the server, hence relieving the client of performing costly operations. We found that Dilithium’s advantage over Falcon is that Dilithium’s execution is faster while the workload to be performed is distributed equally among client and server, whereas Falcon’s advantage over Dilithium lies within the small signature sizes and the unequally distributed computational tasks. In a client server model with a performance limited client (i.e. Internet-of-Things - IoT - environments) Falcon could proof useful for it constrains the computational hard tasks to the server and leaves a minimal workload to the client. Furthermore, Falcon requires smaller bandwidth, making it a strong candidate for deep-edge or IoT applications.