HADES: Automated Hardware Design Exploration for Cryptographic Primitives

While formal constructions for cryptographic schemes have steadily evolved and emerged over the past decades, the design and implementation of efficient and secure hardware instances are still mostly manual, tedious, and intuition-driven processes. With the increasing complexity of modern cryptography, e.g., Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) schemes, and consideration of physical implementation attacks, e.g., Side-Channel Analysis (SCA), the design space often grows exorbitantly without developers being able to weigh all design options.This emphasizes the evident necessity for tool-assisted Design Space Exploration (DSE) for efficient and secure cryptographic hardware. To address this demand, we present the HADES framework. This tool systematically traverses the design space driven by security requirements, rapidly predicts user-defined performance metrics, e.g., area footprint or cycle-accurate latency, and instantiates the most suitable candidate in a synthesizable Hardware Description Language (HDL).We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework by applying our proof-of-concept implementation to a wide-ranging selection of symmetric and PQC schemes, including the ChaCha20 stream cipher and the PQC standard Kyber. Notably, for these schemes, we present the first hardware implementations featuring arbitrary-order masking.