High-Performance Hardware Implementation of Crystals-Dilithium Based on Improved MDC-NTT

The growing threat of quantum computing to traditional cryptographic systems has necessitated the development of robust post-quantum algorithms. Crystal-Dilithium, recently standardized by NIST after a three-round competition, is a leading lattice-based digital signature algorithm designed to meet this need. However, conventional hardware implementations of Dilithium often suffer from inefficiencies and performance bottlenecks. To address these weaknesses, this work presents an optimized hardware design for Dilithium across all security levels. The proposed design features a parallel modular multiplication unit, and an enhanced scaling method to reduce bit width and minimize calibration. Additionally, an improved radix-2 Multipath Delay Commutator Number Theoretic Transform (MDC-NTT) and pipelined parallelization using FIFO and BRAM-based buffers are integrated to maximize operating frequency. Evaluated on the Xilinx Artix-7 platform, our implementation achieves a peak frequency of 191 MHz, delivering speedups of 26.3%, 32.5% and 29.6% for key generation, signature generation and signature verification respectively, compared with state-of-the-art works at the highest security level, along with superior hardware efficiency.