Hardware Design for Post-Quantum Cryptography and Homomorphic Encryption

As quantum computing continues to advance, many of the cryptographic systems currently in wide use-such as RSA and ECC-will become vulnerable. In anticipation of this transition, this project focuses on developing dedicated hardware support for post-quantum cryptography, or PQC, aimed at making prospective digital systems secure against powerful quantum computing capabilities.

The core of this work is centred on efficient, secure hardware architectures for PQC algorithms based on lattices- Kyber, Sabre, Dilithium, which are well-known for their strong security but also for their high computational requirements. The primary objective of this project is to significantly enhance performance, reduce energy consumption, and increase resistance to implementation-level attacks, such as through the design of accelerators and optimised datapaths in these algorithms.

This complements the work towards examining how future secure hardware might also enable privacy-preserving computation without exposing sensitive data, using techniques like Fully Homomoprhic Encryption. The overall goal of the project is to take a step towards developing practical, future-proof hardware foundations that enable next-generation cryptography to be usable at scale, facilitating seamless migration in the post-quantum era.