Paper 2025/497 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/497 ↗

Fast Scloud+: A Fast Hardware Implementation for the Unstructured LWE-based KEM - Scloud+

Abstract

Scloud+ is an unstructured LWE-based key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) with conservative quantum security, in which ternary secrets and lattice coding are incorporated for higher computational and communication efficiency. However, its efficiencies are still much inferior to those of the structured LWE-based KEM, like ML-KEM (standardized by NIST). In this paper, we present a configurable hardware architecture for Scloud+.KEM to improve the computational efficiency. Many algorithmic and architectural co-optimizations are proposed to reduce the complexity and increase the degree of parallelism. Specially, the matrix multiplications are computed by a block in serial and the block is calculated in one cycle, without using any multipliers. In addition, the random bits all are generated by an unfolded Keccak core, well matched with the data flow required by the block matrix multiplier. The proposed design is coded in Verilog and implemented under the SMIC 40nm LP CMOS technology. The synthesized results show that Scloud+.KEM-128 only costs 23.0 $us$, 24.3 $us$, and 24.6 $us$ in the KeyGen, Encaps, and Decaps stages, respectively, with an area consumption of 0.69 $mm^2$, significantly narrowing the gap with the state-of-the-art of Kyber hardware implementation.