Making the Case for a Keccak Instruction

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" summary

Proposes a dedicated Keccak/SHA3 instruction that packs the 1600-bit Keccak state across vector registers and an operand collector, showing the permutation costs ~2,000 software cycles vs ~24 cycles in hardware. Benchmarks on Kyber and Dilithium find 60–80% of cycles spent in Keccak; handwritten intrinsics give ~3× speedup, but a single instruction yields an order-of-magnitude (10×+) improvement, saving significant server TLS CPU and energy and working on prototype silicon with 256-bit collectors.

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" chapters (7)

1. 0:00Introduction to Keccak instruction
2. 1:50Current RISC-V crypto standards
3. 3:36Post-quantum cryptography standards
4. 6:47Performance impact on post-quantum crypto
5. 9:16Keccak’s software bottleneck
6. 12:06Proposal for Keccak instruction
7. 17:22Conclusion and next steps

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