Multi-year hardware-software co-design collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy and the Institute of Information Science at Academia Sinica yields production-ready classical and post-quantum cryptography—to be presented at Real World Crypto 2026
BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ZeroRISC, the transparent silicon supply chain integrity company, today announced the full open-source release of its cryptographic hardware and software stack for both classical and post-quantum operations. The release pairs the configurable Cryptolib embedded cryptography library with their open-source silicon platform—including a programmable Asymmetric Cryptography Coprocessor (ACC) for post-quantum and classical asymmetric algorithms and dedicated hardware accelerators for symmetric operations like AES and SHA2/3. Together, they form a complete, co-designed hardware-software embedded cryptography solution.
The collaboration builds on prior work presented in Towards ML-KEM and ML-DSA on OpenTitan (IEEE S&P 2025) and includes new collaborative results described in Improving ML-KEM and ML-DSA on OpenTitan, to appear at CHES 2026. Both works form the basis of a joint presentation at Real World Crypto 2026 in Taipei on March 9.
The effort represents the best of mutually reinforcing collaboration between academic research and industry practice. ZeroRISC provided an open-source, production-grade secure silicon platform for researcher investigation, with frequent touchpoints and organized coordination throughout, and in turn benefited from the results of those academic efforts to produce state-of-the-art, open-source embedded hardware and software cryptographic implementations.
Our research collaborators designed extended vector ISA instructions, new multiplier and adder hardware, and additional datapath registers for the ACC—modifications to the silicon itself alongside software optimizations—that achieved 6–9x speedups for the newly standardized ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithms and improved maximum operating frequency by 36–75% with near-zero area cost. ZeroRISC engineers then integrated, refined, and hardened the results across both hardware and software: memory optimizations reduced ML-DSA stack usage by over 90%, informing the coprocessor’s final memory configuration; improvements to the KMAC hardware interface reduced processor stall cycles and enabled new software optimizations; and novel rejection sampling techniques cut ML-DSA cycle counts by more than half and eliminated ML-KEM processor stalls. The entire lattice cryptography capability is parametrized, allowing integrators to include or exclude the PQC hardware extensions per their needs—a configurability that extends from the RTL through to the software library.
Cryptolib’s production maturity extends across both classical and post-quantum cryptography. On the classical side, the library supports a wide range of cryptographic algorithms, including AES (multiple modes), SHA2/SHA3 hashing, RSA key generation and operations, elliptic curve cryptography (ECDSA, ECDH, Ed25519, X25519), and various KDF schemes. Its modular architecture lets users select only the algorithms they need, and it includes robust testing infrastructure with functional tests, automated KAT testing against Wycheproof and NIST vectors, and simulation/debugging tools.
On the post-quantum side, Cryptolib now includes hardware-accelerated implementations of three families of NIST-standardized PQC algorithms: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA. The SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+) implementation has been in production since the earliest chip samples, providing post-quantum secure boot from day one.
“Open-source silicon and cryptography are the future of device security,” said Dom Rizzo, CEO and founder of ZeroRISC. “Cryptolib’s expansive classical and post-quantum support is proof of what’s possible when open-source silicon engineers and world-class cryptographers co-design hardware and software together in the open. It matured through years of collaborative engineering—researchers providing deep insight into what was possible, industry engineers refining the software and hardware for commercial production, both working from shared code with rigorous review. The result is a cryptographic stack, from silicon to software, that is fast, verifiable, and built for the common good. Open ecosystems compound value when the work is genuinely shared.”
“The open-source paradigm has very successfully driven progress in the software space—it’s time to extend that to hardware,” said Peter Schwabe, Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy. “Our collaboration with ZeroRISC on post-quantum cryptography demonstrates exactly what becomes possible when you do. Open-source silicon accelerates research the same way open-source software always has, and produces cryptographic implementations that meet the highest standards of performance, security, and long-term maintainability. This is how research moves responsibly from the lab into production—and how that progress becomes available to everyone.”
At Real World Crypto 2026, the combined academic and commercial consortium will present these results in a talk entitled “Migrating a Silicon Root of Trust to Post-Quantum Crypto” on the hardware-software co-design methodology behind Cryptolib’s PQC capabilities, including how high-performance lattice cryptography was brought to production within the strict memory and power constraints of embedded systems.
As NIST’s post-quantum standards take effect and industries from critical infrastructure to cloud computing prepare for the quantum transition, the need for production-grade, openly verifiable PQC implementations grows urgent. Cryptolib and its hardware pair provide a foundation that device manufacturers, silicon integrators, and security architects can build on with confidence—backed by peer-reviewed research, open-source transparency, and engineering discipline.
The technical arc behind this work has been documented publicly through an extensive series of posts on the ZeroRISC blog, covering topics from post-quantum secure boot to RSA optimization to Cryptolib’s design philosophy. A companion post details the full PQC optimization journey from research artifact to production.
About ZeroRISC
ZeroRISC delivers verifiable supply chain integrity via secure open-source silicon designs and secure device identity. The ZeroRISC Integrity Management Platform forges immutable trust of hardware by software, affording customers the power to separate device security from place of manufacture. ZeroRISC integrates open-source silicon designs, implements scalable security throughout the supply chain, and provides next-generation below-the-operating-system device management services. Headquartered in Boston, MA, ZeroRISC was founded by Dominic Rizzo, an open-source silicon pioneer and the OpenTitan project founder. ZeroRISC is a leading open-source contributor, driving the commercialization of open-source silicon designs and device management software. For more information, visit https://www.zerorisc.com/.
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