SiFive hooks up with PQShield for PQC

PQShield,  the quantum-safe cryptography provider, and SiFive have partnered to deliver post-quantum cryptography on SiFive’s Essential and Performance high-performance processor families, protecting critical aerospace, consumer, defence, and automotive systems from quantum attacks and accelerating the adoption of NIST post-quantum cryptography standards on RISC-V technologies.

Quantum computers will be able to crack the current encryption standards. This also presents the immediate threat of “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks (where attackers steal data today, to crack into later with a quantum computer).

As governments and institutions prepare for the quantum threat, a new cybersecurity benchmark has emerged through NIST’s standardization of post quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms, which are designed to resist quantum attacks.

To ensure they are leveraging the best security and staying one step ahead of the hackers, hardware and software manufacturers are migrating their products to PQC encryptions in line with NIST’s new standards for post-quantum cryptography.

RISC-V is emerging as a system architecture for IoT, aerospace, defence, and automotive that increasingly require greater compute density and to handle greater workloads. There is a need to modernise RISC-V cryptography to ensure it can operate in these harsh environments in a quantum-safe manner that is secure and cost-effective – without diminishing speed or performance.

Integrating PQShield’s PQPlatform-CoPro technology with SiFive’s Essential RISC-V processors overcomes this challenge and delivers the highest level of protection and trust for automobiles, consumer devices, and defense and aerospace applications.

The combination of PQShield’s security IP and SiFive’s  processor IP yields hardware security that can be deployed immediately to establish a quantum-resistant hardware Root-of-Trust – arguably the foundation of any secure system.

As a result, product designers leveraging SiFive’s RISC-V processors can build products that comply with NIST’s recently published standards for post-quantum cryptography without compromising performance or lifecycle.

This partnership will also allow PQShield’s cryptographic libraries to utilize RISC-V vector extensions for the very first time. Through this, developers can maintain post-quantum protection while taking advantage of the performance benefits of RISC-V vector extension implementations in SiFive Performance P470 CPUs.

“Implementing post-quantum protection is a major step for our Essential and high-performance processors and a strong benefit to our customers,” says SiFive’s Yann Loisel, “this collaboration ensures that designers of RISC-V vector extensions will be working with the latest generation of cybersecurity.”