On the use of hardware accelerators in QC-MDPC code-based cryptography

Public-key cryptography (PKC) allows exchanging keys over an insecure channel without sharing a secret key. However, quantum computers threaten to break traditional PKC, thus, to mitigate such risk, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) aims to develop cryptosystems that are secure against attacks from quantum and classical computers. BIKE [1] is a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) based on quasi-cyclic moderate-density parity-check (QC-MDPC) codes that is a candidate within the NIST standardization process to identify a set of PQC algorithms [4]. Figure 1 depicts the key exchange between two client and server nodes, which requires the sequential execution of the key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation KEM primitives. Key generation and decapsulation are performed on the client side, while encapsulation is carried out by the server. Despite the vast literature targeting efficient hardware support for BIKE, each proposal delivered computing platforms meant either to maximize performance or minimize resource utilization.