Xiphera Ltd, a Finnish company designing and licensing cryptographic IP cores for FPGAs and ASICs, announced today that it has published a new white paper with Flex Logix, the leading supplier of eFPGA IP. The paper explains how advances in quantum computing technology threaten the security of current cryptosystems and how this can be averted with Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) running on embedded FPGAs (eFPGAs.)
While quantum computing and its development offer answers to various computational problems, they also threaten the security of current cryptosystems. PQC systems respond to this growing quantum threat because they are based on mathematical problems that cannot be solved efficiently with Shor’s algorithm, or by any other known quantum computing algorithm. When PQC is implemented on eFPGA, it can provide the crypto agility that customers need to change the PQC algorithms, yet provide the performance, power and cost savings over other alternatives.
“PQC is expected to happen within the next few years, so companies developing chips that need to be operational for 10+ years, should build in crypto agility in their chips today,” said Kimmo Järvinen, Co-Founder and CTO of Xiphera. “Using eFPGA as implementation platforms for PQC enables a smooth and secure shift from traditional cryptosystems to the new PQC systems.”
“SoC designers need the ability to change algorithms as needed without sacrificing power and cost savings to address algorithms evolving over time,” said Andy Jaros, VP of Sales for Flex Logix. “If PQC is implemented on an eFPGA platform, then all forthcoming updates and algorithm modifications can be supported by simply reprogramming eFPGA. In addition, it is also possible to retro-fit PQC into systems that already have eFPGA included in the SoC.”
Many organizations and associations will require PQC support on security systems in the near future. However, these requirements and the continuously changing PQC landscape requires a new level of crypto agility and the ability to update and change cryptographic algorithms in deployed systems.
The white paper discusses implementation of PQC algorithms on eFPGA and how this can deliver tremendous advantages to SoC designers. Not only can it allow the updating of PQC algorithms according to their development status, but it also enables designers to combine PQC with traditional cryptosystems and existing crypto modules in order to protect against unlikely but possible failures of the new PQC systems.
To download the white paper, click here. For more information, contact info@xiphera.com.
