Synopsys Agile PQC Public Key Accelerators

Quantum computers will solve some of the most complex problems in minutes versus the potentially thousands of years that classical computers and supercomputers would require. Because they will rapidly break current ECC and RSA cryptography, placing sensitive data and systems at risk, it's important to consider post-quantum cryptography in today's SoC designs, not a future upgrade. With the NIST PQC standards finalized, migration planning is underway across the industry, and long-lived platforms need crypto agility built into the silicon.

Synopsys Agile Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Public Key Accelerators (PKAs) are quantum-safe IP solutions that offload the computationally intensive operations required for asymmetric cryptography, including the latest NIST-selected quantum-resistant algorithms.

Synopsys Agile PQC PKAs comply with the latest NIST PQC digital signature, key encapsulation and encryption algorithms, including:

• ML-KEM (FIPS 203, formerly CRYSTALS-Kyber): This algorithm is based on lattice problems and offers a balance of security, efficiency, and ease of implementation, making it a suitable choice for general encryption tasks.
• ML-DSA (FIPS 204, formerly CRYSTALS-Dilithium): This algorithm is also based on lattice problems but is specifically designed for digital signatures, offering strong security guarantees and efficient performance.
• SLH-DSA (FIPS 205, formerly SPHINCS+): This algorithm employs a stateless hash-based approach, offering a different set of security assurances compared to lattice-based methods.
• XMSS & LMS (SP 800-208): These algorithms are from the NIST standard SP 800-208, which was released in 2020. Both XMSS and LMS rely on the Merkle tree structure, which provides a secure and efficient way to manage and verify many signatures.
• FN-DSA (Falcon) and HQC are on the roadmap.

Synopsys Agile PQC PKAs can adapt to the standards' evolutions by efficiently incorporating hardware and embedded firmware, where the hardware accelerates the main cryptographic primitives for performance and power benefits, but the higher-level algorithms are implemented in firmware to provide flexibility for future algorithm updates. The traditional ECC and RSA algorithms as well as hybrid schemes are also supported. 

Synopsys Agile PKAs are highly configurable and scalable and can be tuned for most optimal performance, area, power, and latency.