The emergence of quantum computing technology will endanger many current cryptographic algorithms, especially the public key cryptographic algorithms widely used to protect digital information. To this end, security experts around the world are busy developing technical standards for "post-quantum cryptography" and analyzing the many challenges of migrating from public key cryptography infrastructure to backward quantum cryptography. One of them is the high computational requirements of post-quantum encryption methods. Now, a team led by Georges Siegel, professor of information security at the Technical University of Munich, has designed and built a chip that can effectively apply post-quantum cryptography.
The chip is a so-called application-specific integrated circuit, which is usually designed and manufactured to meet user requirements and the needs of a particular electronic system. Siegel team based on open source RISC - V standard changed the chip design, and apply the method of collaborative design of hardware and software by modifying the kernel and accelerate the necessary calculation operation special instructions, and extend designed a special hardware accelerators, makes quantum encryption after the new chip can achieve better performance.
The new chip can be used not only with Kyber, the most promising candidate for post-quantum cryptography, but also with SIKE, an alternative algorithm that requires more computing power. The chip uses Kyber encryption about 10 times faster and consumes about eight times less energy than a chip based entirely on a software solution. Using SIKE encryption, however, will be 21 times faster than chips using only software solutions. Because SIKE is seen as a promising alternative. Where chips are used for a long time, such precautions make sense.
So-called hardware trojans are also a growing threat to post-quantum cryptography, researchers believe. This could have serious consequences if an attacker succeeded in embedding Trojan circuits into a chip design before or during its manufacture. "Until now, we know very little about how real attackers use hardware trojans," Siegel explained. To develop protection measures, we put ourselves in the attackers' shoes, developing and hiding the Trojan ourselves. That's why we built four trojans and then put them into our post-quantum chip, and they work very differently."
Over the next few months, Siegel and his team will focus on testing the chip's encryption capabilities and the hardware Trojan's functionality and verifiability. Segal has developed a new ai program that can reverse engineer to reconstruct the exact function of the chip, even without available documentation. Through a complex process, the conductor rails inside the chip are polished layer by layer, and each layer is photographed. An artificial intelligence program is then used to reconstruct the exact function of the chip. "This reconstruction can help identify chip components whose functions are unrelated to the actual task and may be embedded into them," Siegel said. Such a process could one day become the standard for spot checks on bulk chip orders. Combined with effective post-quantum encryption, we can make hardware in factories and cars more secure."