Hardware Realization and Implementation Security Evaluation of HQC, A NIST PQC Standard

This talk by Sanjay Deshpande from Northwestern University explores the critical transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) in response to the threat quantum computers pose to current public-key algorithms. It provides a deep dive into the Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) algorithm, a code-based candidate for NIST standardization. The session focuses on the challenges and innovations in creating efficient and secure hardware implementations of HQC, covering performance optimization for polynomial multiplication and countermeasures against side-channel attacks.