Paper 2026/837

Trident: Efficient FPGA Acceleration of XMSS Tree in Post-Quantum Signature Scheme SLH-DSA

Joshua Ennis, University of North Texas

Kirill Morozov, University of North Texas

Jiafeng Xie, Villanova University

Abstract

The emergence of quantum computing poses significant threats to conventional cryptographic systems, necessitating the efficient hardware acceleration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), especially on the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platforms. SPHINCS$^+$, recently standardized by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) as SLH-DSA (Stateless Hash-Based Digital Signature Algorithm), represents the only hash-based digital signature scheme. Its practical deployment, however, is restricted by computationally intense operations, particularly in the eXtended Merkle Signature Scheme (XMSS) tree, where WOTS+ (Winternitz One-Time Signature Plus) public key generation consumes the majority of signature generation cycles. With this background, this paper presents Trident, an innovative FPGA-based hardware accelerator that addresses critical performance and resource challenges in XMSS of SLH-DSA. First, we propose a triangle hash unit architecture that enables parallel execution of up to three hash operations simultaneously, directly addressing the computational bottleneck in XMSS tree construction and WOTS+ chain operations. Second, we develop an optimized memory caching scheme that reduces on-chip memory requirements via intermediate value management. Third, we implement the Trident on FPGAs and comprehensively evaluate it across all parameter sets at multiple security levels, i.e., up to 8.6$\times$ improvement in signature generation and up to 5.4$\times$ speed-up in verification operations. Extended Hypertree evaluation shows a 34.6$\times$ area-delay product (ADP) improvement on UltraScale+ FPGA for SLH-DSA-128s. This Trident represents a significant advancement toward practical SLH-DSA deployment in FPGA environments.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/837,
      author = {Tianyou Bao and Joshua Ennis and Kirill Morozov and Jiafeng Xie},
      title = {Trident: Efficient {FPGA} Acceleration of {XMSS} Tree in Post-Quantum Signature Scheme {SLH}-{DSA}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/837},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/837}
}