Proteus: A Pipelined NTT Architecture Generator

Abstract

Number theoretic transform (NTT) is a fundamental building block in emerging cryptographic constructions such as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), post-quantum cryptography (PQC), and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP). In this work, we introduce Proteus, an open-source parametric hardware to generate pipelined architectures for the NTT. For a given parameter set including the polynomial degree and size of the coefficient modulus, Proteus can generate Radix-2 NTT architectures using single-path delay feedback (SDF) and multipath delay commutator (MDC) approaches. We also present a detailed analysis of NTT implementation approaches and use several optimizations to achieve the best NTT configuration. Our evaluations demonstrate performance gain up to$1.8\times$compared to SDF and MDC-based NTT implementations in the literature. Our SDF and MDC architectures use$1.75\times$and$6.5\times$less DSPs, and$3\times$and$10.5\times$less BRAMs, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art SDF and MDC-based NTT implementations.