These processors have been developed to protect critical aerospace, consumer, defence, and automotive systems from quantum attacks and to accelerate the adoption of NIST post-quantum cryptography standards on RISC-V technologies.
Powerful quantum computers are expected to be able to crack the current encryption standards used to protect software and hardware applications globally and present an 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 standardisation 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 now migrating their products to PQC encryptions in line with NIST's new standards for post-quantum cryptography.
RISC-V is rapidly emerging as a leading system architecture, crucial to sectors as diverse as IoT, aerospace, defence, and automotives all of which increasingly require greater compute density in order to handle greater workloads. Consequently, there is a need to modernise RISC-V cryptography to ensure it can operate 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 looks to overcome this challenge and deliver a higher level of protection and trust for applications. The combination of PQShield's security IP and SiFive's processor IP will yield a future-proof hardware security solution that can be deployed immediately to establish a quantum-resistant hardware Root-of-Trust - arguably the foundation of any secure system, and recently determined the highest priority use case by the NSA.
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 utilise 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.
Commenting Graeme Hickey, PQShield's VP of Engineering, said, "Partnering with SiFive is a perfect match for PQShield as we co-authored NIST's PQC standards and have contributed extensively to the RISC-V instructions extensions for cryptography."
Yann Loisel, Principal Security Architect at SiFive, added, "Implementing post-quantum protection is a major step for our Essential and high-performance processors and a strong benefit to our customers. This collaboration ensures that designers of RISC-V vector extensions will be working with the latest generation of cybersecurity."
