Paper 2026/841

HAKE: Efficient Hardware Accelerator for Key Generation of Post-Quantum Signature Scheme PERK

Tianyou Bao, Villanova University

Loïc Bidoux, Technology Innovation Institute

Jiafeng Xie, Villanova University

Abstract

The rapid progress in quantum computing has sparked a new wave of cryptosystem innovation, namely, the development of cryptographic schemes that are resistant to quantum attacks, known as Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). Notably, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has already initiated the PQC standardization process with several algorithms selected. Meanwhile, an additional round of digital signature scheme competition is on-going. Following the standardization efforts, many investigations in the field have gradually switched to the implementation side (especially on the hardware platform aspect). This paper follows this trend by delivering an efficient Hardware Accelerator for Key Generation of the digital signature scheme PERK (HAKE), which is one of the promising candidates in the NIST additional round of digital signature scheme standardization. Apart from that, we have followed the PERK's recent update to design two versions of Key Generation accelerators, one based on the previous PERK specification and another based on the newly released specification. Overall, we have conducted three major efforts to obtain the proposed accelerators. (i) We have broken down the Key Generation process of PERK into three distinct components through detailed algorithmic analysis, and meanwhile, we have proposed innovative methodologies to reduce these components' hardware design complexities. (ii) We have developed dedicated hardware microarchitectures for these components to construct the Key Generation accelerator (HAKE). (iii) We have conducted detailed implementation and comparison to showcase the efficiency of the proposed accelerator. For instance, it is shown that the proposed accelerator (following the previous PERK specification) is found to be 14.3$\times$ faster than the software implemented one and less area-time complexities than other recent NIST-selected SPHINCS$^+$ hardware accelerations. Overall, our design is highly efficient and configurable, and it is the first hardware accelerator for Key Generation of PERK, to the best of our knowledge. This research will be beneficial for the ongoing NIST PQC standardization and hardware acceleration for related schemes, and attract many follow up works in the field.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/841,
      author = {Brendan Funk and Tianyou Bao and Loïc Bidoux and Jiafeng Xie},
      title = {{HAKE}: Efficient Hardware Accelerator for Key Generation of Post-Quantum Signature Scheme {PERK}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/841},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/841}
}