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
Ivan Sarno received the B.Sc. degree in Computer Science and the M.Sc. degree in Cybersecurity from the University of Pisa, Italy. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the University of Grenoble Alpes, conducting his research at CEA List and TIMA Laboratory, Grenoble, France. His research focuses on secure hardware/software implementation of post-quantum cryptography on RISC-V platforms, including custom ISA extensions for cryptographic acceleration.