2026-06-09 –, Poster Island B
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is rapidly becoming a security requirement, and ML-KEM (FIPS 203) is emerging as a foundational primitive for future secure systems. On RISC-V platforms, performance evaluations frequently emphasize custom extensions or dedicated accelerators, while the optimization potential of the standard ISA remains comparatively underexplored. This paper establishes a rigorous performance baseline for the main computational kernels of ML-KEM using only the standard RISC-V Vector Extension (RVV). Rather than relying on handwritten assembly, we apply targeted C-level program transformations that systematically enable effective compiler autovectorization, achieving up to a 10× reduction in instruction count for NTT while preserving portability across all RVV-compliant implementations.
Stefano Di Matteo received his M.Sc. (2019) and Ph.D. (2023) respectively in Electronic Engineering and Information Engineering from the University of Pisa. He is currently a tenure-track researcher in hardware implementation of Post-Quantum Cryptography at CEA in Grenoble. His research interests include hardware implementation of PQC with countermeasures against physical attacks, RISC-V architectures, and Instruction Set Extensions for PQC
