MPI-SP is part of the first open-source silicon distribution with production-grade post-quantum cryptography

MPI-SP is one of the founding members of Pavona - a new open-source silicon ecosystem hosted by GlobalPlatform that brings together a community of industry leaders and major academic institutions

To the point:

• Quantum-resistant encryption schemes are currently not readily available for mass implementation in special-purpose hardware

• Pavona is a new open-source silicon ecosystem hosted by GlobalPlatform that brings together a community of industry leaders and major academic institutions to help accelerate secure-by-design, modular silicon through reusable building blocks, open collaboration, and production-ready foundations.

• MPI-SP joins Pavona as one of the founding members to ensure commercial-grade integration of our research.

 

The looming threat of quantum computers has led to the development of quantum-resistant encryption schemes, which are now standardized and widely implemented in many areas, from internet search engines to messaging apps. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy were significantly involved in the development of three of those schemes, namely Kyber (ML-KEM), Dilithium (ML-DSA), and SPHINCS+ (SLH-DSA).

There is, however, one particular area that remains vulnerable to quantum computers: special-purpose hardware. The Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy has joined a large open-source silicon initiative that aims to bring quantum-resistant schemes and standards to hardware-oriented solutions. Pavona is a new open-source silicon ecosystem hosted by GlobalPlatform that brings together a community of industry leaders and major academic institutions to help accelerate secure-by-design, modular silicon through reusable building blocks, open collaboration, and production-ready foundations.

Such a collaboration offers our scientists the opportunity to receive direct feedback from partners focused on hardware security and to reshape the direction of our research to ensure the real-world application of our science with the support of our industry partners.

For example, ZeroRISC, the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Fraunhofer AISEC and Academia Sinica presented recently results from a multi-year hardware-software co-design collaboration demonstrating 6–9x performance improvements for the newly standardized ML-KEM and ML-DSA post-quantum algorithms on embedded silicon, with 36–75% improvements in maximum operating frequency at near-zero area cost.

“Our collaboration on post-quantum cryptography for Pavona demonstrates what the open-source silicon model uniquely enables: peer-reviewed research with a direct path to commercial-grade integration,” says Peter Schwabe, Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy.

About Pavona:

Pavona is a new open-source silicon ecosystem hosted by GlobalPlatform, bringing together reusable silicon components, production-grade tooling, certification-aware design, and community governance to help accelerate the development of secure, trusted hardware. Source code, CI results, getting-started examples, and documentation are available at www.pavona.org.