A System-on-a-Chip Implementation of a Post-Quantum Cryptography Scheme for Smart Meter Data Communications

Abstract

The security of Smart Meter (SM) systems will be a challenge in the era of quantum computing because a quantum computer might exploit characteristics of well-established cryptographic schemes to reach a successful security breach. From a practical perspective, this paper focuses on the feasibility of implementing a quantum-secure lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism in a SM, hardware-constrained equipment. In this regard, the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) scheme, FrodoKEM, an alternate candidate for the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum standardization process, is implemented using a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) device in which the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) component is exploited to accelerate the most time-consuming routines in this scheme. Experimental results show that the execution time to run the FrodoKEM scheme in an SoC device reduces to one-third of that obtained by the benchmark implementation (i.e., the software implementation). Also, the attained execution time and hardware resource usage of this SoC-based implementation of the FrodoKEM scheme show that lattice-based cryptography may fit into SM equipment.