Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Utsav Banerjee

Anantha P Chandrakasan

Chiraag Juvekar

Systems and methods for implementing confidential communications between nodes of a network provide reduced power consumption, require less memory, and provide improved security, relative to previously-known systems and method. Preferred embodiments implement protocol functions in hardware, as opposed to software, to yield some or all of the foregoing improvements. Some embodiments use a hashing circuit for multiple purposes, while maintaining its ability to compute successive intermediate hash values. Some embodiments improve security of systems using circuits configured to leverage a favorable data format.

Systems for providing secure communications using a protocol engine

Described is a lattice cryptography processor with configurable parameters. The lattice cryptography processor includes a sampling circuit configured to operate in accordance with a Secure Hash Algorithm 3 (SHA-3)-based pseudo-random number generator (PRNG), a single-port random access memory (RAM)-based number theoretic transform (NTT) memory architecture and a modular arithmetic unit. The described lattice cryptography processor is configured to be programmed with custom instructions for polynomial arithmetic and sampling. The configurable lattice cryptography processor may operate with lattice-based CCA-secure key encapsulation and a variety of different lattice-based protocols including, but not limited to: Frodo, NewHope, qTESLA, CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium, achieving up to an order of magnitude improvement in performance and energy-efficiency compared to state-of-the-art hardware implementations.

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Cambridge, MA, United States of America

Utsav Banerjee