Migrating a Silicon Root of Trust to Post-Quantum Crypto

Abstract

Our talk will present the story of how we built hardware-accelerated post-quantum cryptography (ML-DSA, ML-KEM, and SLH-DSA) on the OpenTitan root of trust. These implementations reflect a multi-year, multi-national, multi-discipline effort spanning academia and industry, and are on track to be taped out in production systems at scale. We will discuss the challenges posed by the strict memory and performance requirements of a small embedded system, and how developing the software and hardware together informed our design choices. We will also position this effort in the larger context of global trends towards open-source hardware and post-quantum migrations, and talk about our future plans.