This summer, I’ll be taking part in the IEEE SSCS “PICO” Chipathon!
I’m super excited to get to be a part of an event where all sorts of open-source EDA developers come together and try to build real, working electronics hardware with fully transparent processes. I’ll be working with a scrappy team of passionate people from all over the globe on a really cool project: building a hardware accelerator for post-quantum cryptographic systems.
The Pitch
After commiting to participate in the chipathon design competition this year, I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to do something involving post-quantum cryptography (PQC).
Why PQC?
Well, two reasons:
- I read a few books by Neal Stephenson (namely Cryptonomicon and Anathem) a few years ago. Both of those stories have fascinated me and inspired me to learn more about how math changes the world.
- I took Dr. Paul Fili’s course on cryptography here at Oklahoma State. This was my first introduction to a lot of complex math topics like number theory, abstract algebra, and topology, and I really enjoyed it.
I posted a call to action in the Chipathon Discord channels: if people were interested in doing a PQC project, they should reach out to me. It didn’t take long for the DMs to start pouring in, and before I knew it I had a crack team of technologists ready to get started.
The Team
In no particular order, the team consists of the following individuals.
| Name | Brief Bio |
|---|---|
| Me! | You know who I am. Or if you don’t you can learn more on the About page. |
| Rahul Tiwari | Standard cell layout design engineer at Synopsys Hyderabad. |
| Emon Sarkar | Grad student (like me!) studying ECE at the University of Waterloo. |
| Bhanuday Bhardwaj | Researcher in neuromorphic computing at the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) in India. |
| Karan Mali | Freelance hardware designer with experience in avionics comms who also did a stint at CDAC. |
| N Nishchit | Undergrad (with some serious embedded programming experience) studying ECE at BMS College of Engineering. |
You can follow our progress on GitHub under the Team Rocket Org. We’ll also be updating this GitHub issue weekly with project details and progress.
The Project
Once we had the team together, we decided as a group that we wanted to build hardware that would be useful for accelerating modern (or even future) cryptographic systems. There’s been a lot of work on the Learning With Errors problem lately, and we ended up deciding to focus our efforts on the TFHE cryptosystem.
Our goal is to build an AXI-compatible coprocessor to speed up TFHE operations. We intend to build a highly modular design which can be easily plugged into existing open cores or parted out into useful IP blocks.
I’m incredibly excited to see where this goes. Hopefully as I learn more about TFHE I’ll post some of what I discover here. Stay tuned!