FrodoKEM Hardware Implementation for Post-Quantum Cryptography
Fernando Aparicio Urbano-Molano, Jaime Velasco-Medina · IEEE Latin America Transactions · 2025
FrodoKEM, a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) based on the learning with errors (LWE) problem, would be included for standardization by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and recommended for PQC migration by the BSI (German Federal Office for Information Security) and the ANSSI (French Cybersecurity Agency). It is closely related to the challenging time-computational problem inherent to algebraically unstructured lattices. However, hardware implementations of this scheme are required to verify its effectiveness in real-world applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first hardware implementation of FrodoKEM using High-Level Synthesis (HLS), which meets all requirements of the version submitted for standardization to ISO. The proposed design started with the profiling of the reference C software implementation using Valgrind software tools, to identify the functions that are the most time-consuming. The advantages of the proposed implementation include a 34% improvement in the speed metric of the Key Generation module in comparison with the reference software implementation. The results show that the key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation use 26%, 39%, and 32%, respectively, of the total area utilization on the Artix-7.