A Lightweight and Efficient Post Quantum Crypto-Processor for ML-DSA

Powerful quantum computers have raised people’s serious concerns on traditional cryptography, leading to great efforts on searching post-quantum alternatives. The screening winner, module lattice-based digital signature algorithm (ML-DSA), is recommended due to good performance and efficiency. However, its hardware implementation exhibits heavy resource burden on logic and memory. This paper presents a lightweight and efficient ML-DSA processor towards resource-constrained applications. The proposed Toeplitz multiplier reduces memory demand with performing specific computations in regular domain representation. Lightweight SHA-3 and samplers alleviate complex connections of large registers through introducing align structure. Diverse modular operations are optimized with shift-and-addition method for decreasing DSP consumption. Moreover, we design a crossover memory scheduling with processing rearrangement to further lower storage requirement. It also enables efficient parallel executions without memory conflict. The ML-DSA processor consumes 15370/7843/7.5/2 LUTs/FFs/BRAMs/DSPs on Artix-7 device and 0.08 mm² with 27.5 kB SRAM on TSMC 28nm technology. It achieves 51% resource reduction and $4.12\times $ area-time product (ATP) improvement over similar state-of-the-art lightweight implementation.