Comparative Performance Analysis of NIST PQC Standards: From STM32 Software Limitations to FPGA-SoC Acceleration
International Innovation, Science, and Technology Conference (InnoSciTech), Muğla, Türkiye, 15 - 18 Mayıs 2026, ss.36-40, (Tam Metin Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
- Basıldığı Şehir: Muğla
- Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.36-40
- Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
- Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
The rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a significant threat to classical public-key cryptographic systems, necessitating the transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). This study investigates the implementation challenges of NISTstandardized signature schemes on resource-constrained embedded hardware. We present a comparative analysis of SPHINCS+ and CRYSTALS-Dilithium on an ARM Cortex-M4 (STM32F407G) microcontroller. Our findings reveal that SPHINCS+ is practically unusable in this software-only environment, with impractical execution times. Furthermore, the reference Dilithium implementation failed to execute entirely on the MCU due to severe RAM and timing constraints. To overcome these hardware limitations, we integrated a hardware-accelerated Dilithium core onto a Xilinx Zynq-7000 ZedBoard SoC. By implementing a specialized Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) accelerator in the FPGA fabric, we achieved successful execution with performance rates for key generation and signature generation at millisecond levels. These results demonstrate that while pure software PQC is non-viable for standard microcontrollers, a hardware-software codesign approach provides the necessary efficiency for quantumresistant embedded systems.