CRYSTALS-Dilithium is a lattice-based post-quantum digital signature scheme that is resistant to attacks by quantum computers and has been selected to be standardized in the NIST post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization process. However, the speed performance and design flexibility of the Dilithium still need to be evaluated. This article presents a high-performance software/hardware co-design of CRYSTALS-Dilithium based on the NIST PQC round-3 parameters. High-speed pipelined hardware modules for NTT/INTT, point-wise multiplication/addition, and for SHAKE are included in the design to accelerate the time-consuming operations in Dilithium. All hardware modules are parameterized, thus allowing full support of runtime configuration to increase versatility. Moreover, the proposed software/hardware architecture and tight operating workflows reduce the data transmission overhead between the processor and other hardware modules. The hardware accelerator is implemented with a reconfigurable logic on FPGA and is integrated with the high-performance ARM Cortex-A9 processor in the Xilinx Zynq Architecture. We measure the performance of the software/hardware system for Dilithium in NIST security levels 2, 3, and 5. Compared to pure software implementations, we achieve 8.7–12.5 times speedup in Key generation, 6.3–7.3 times speedup in Sign, and 9.1–12.2 times speedup in Verify operations.

Blockchain inspires many people across the globe and has started getting many adoptions after realizing its promising benefits through successful trials. Applications of blockchain range from cryptocurrency, smart contract, banking, healthcare and identity management, insurance, land registry to IoT industry. However, scalability and throughput issues are major challenges of blockchain and are less researched. Many lightweight nodes especially IoT devices depend and put much workload on blockchain servers since they cannot store the full blockchain due to its huge size. This paper investigates performance bottlenecks in blockchain and presents efficient high performance system for caching the blockchain data in the FPGA network interface controller (NIC) for improving scalability and throughput of blockchain applications. We design a customized SHA-256 hash core specific for efficient blockchain caching to save hashing executions and improve the performance. We built and use Jansson and Curl libraries to interface our system with real Bitcoin core. We finally evaluate the throughput performance of the Bitcoin core. The overall result revealed that our system improves the throughput performance by 103 times when cache hit. The design also offers small work area utilization, low power consumption and higher performance.

The emergence of advanced technologies has spurred the development of high-capacity, long-distance, and high-speed coherent optical communication systems. However, Chromatic Dispersion (CD) is the major challenge of coherent optical communication leading to high power consumption at the receiver which impedes the adoption of the technology. The existing systems adopt a high-complexity FFT-based CD equalization consuming around 20% power in the receiver. In this paper, we propose DFNT-TrDE, an efficient Transform Domain Equalization (TrDE) method that reduces the computational complexity of the CD compensation by leveraging the Fermat Number Transform (FNT, where Fermat number $F_{n} = 2^{b}+1=2^{2^{n}}+1$ ) with diminished-1 representation. We adopt various techniques in the system design. Specifically, we propose High-Radix (HR) FNT to further reduce the complexity for large transform lengths. Moreover, we compare the complexity of 1D circular convolution between 1D-R2, 1D-HR, 2D-R2 and 2D-HR FNT at the granularity of adder level. We furthermore provide recommendations for radix and dimension settings tailored to different transform lengths. The results of our implementation show that the DFNT-TrDE (with $b=8$ ) achieves 62% complexity savings compared to 12-bit split-radix FFT-FDE at a similar Bit Error Rate (BER). The DFNT-TrDE (with $b=16$ ) also achieves 51% complexity savings compared to 16-bit split-radix FFT-FDE at a better BER.

KyberKEM is one of the final round key encapsulation mechanisms in the NIST post-quantum cryptography competition. Number theoretic transform (NTT), as the computing bottleneck of KyberKEM, has been widely studied. Discrete Galois Transformation (DGT) is a variant of NTT that reduces transform length into half but requires more multiplication operations than the latest NTT algorithm in theoretical analysis. This paper proposes the split-radix DGT, a novel DGT variant utilizing the split-radix method, to reduce the computing complexity without compromising the transform length. Specifically, for length-128 polynomial, the split-radix DGT algorithm saves at least 10% multiplication operations compared with the latest NTT algorithm in theoretical analysis. Furthermore, we proposed a unified split-radix DGT processor with the dedicated stream permutation network for KyberKEM and implemented it on the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. The processor achieves at least 49.4% faster transformation and 65.3% faster component-wise multiplication, with at most 87% and 32% LUT-NTT area-time product and LUT-CWM area-time product, compared with the state-of-the-art polynomial multipliers in KyberKEM with the same BFU setting on similar platforms. Lastly, we designed a highly efficient KyberKEM architecture using the proposed split-radix DGT processor. The implementation results on Artix-7 FPGA show significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art KyberKEM designs.

Blockchain technology is one of the most exciting emerging technologies and has the capability to digitally revolutionize many systems for better security, autonomy, transparency, auditability, speed, reduced cost and efficiency. Blockchain can be regarded as a revolutionized distributed ledger technology which uses temper proof database in conjunction with consensus algorithms and cryptography. On the other hand, corruption has been a major problem in developing countries like Nigeria that bedevils their progress and development. In this paper, we investigate corrupt practices in developing countries with Nigeria as a case study. We study some blockchain use cases in some countries like Estonia and Georgia. We propose a blockchain framework to curb corrupt practices related to public funds embezzlement as the biggest corruption act. All transactions made by government agencies are stored in the blockchain shared by anti-corruption agencies, police, judiciaries and other related offices at the same time. We also propose the blockchain architecture and consensus suitable for the framework. Blockchain technology is immune to the influence of central authorities and intermediaries. It is secure against tempering and provides transparency and auditability. Hence using blockchain technology will help to tackle corrupt practices for betterment of developing countries such as Nigeria.