ZeroRISC Delivers Production-Grade Post-Quantum Cryptography for Open Silicon

ZeroRISC has delivered a production-grade, open-source cryptographic hardware and software stack designed to secure systems in a post-quantum computing era, stemming from a multi-year collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy and the Institute of Information Science at Academia Sinica. The release combines the configurableCryptolib library with an open-source silicon platform featuring a programmable Asymmetric Cryptography Coprocessor, offering both classical and post-quantum cryptographic operations; results were presented at Real World Crypto on March 9. Through modifications to the silicon and software optimizations, researchers achieved 6 to 9 times speedups for the newly standardized ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithms, alongside a 36 to 75 percent improvement in maximum operating frequency. “Open-source silicon and cryptography are the future of device security,” said Dom Rizzo, CEO and founder of ZeroRISC, indicating a shift toward transparent and adaptable security solutions for embedded systems.

Open Silicon Platform Enables Post-Quantum Cryptography

A collaborative effort between ZeroRISC and leading research institutions has yielded a production-grade, open-source cryptographic stack designed to withstand the coming threat of quantum computing. This achievement, detailed in presentations at Real World Crypto on March 9, 2026, moves beyond theoretical post-quantum cryptography by integrating optimized algorithms directly into a configurable silicon platform. The project builds on earlier work presented in Towards ML-KEM and ML-DSA on OpenTitan (IEEE S&P 2025) and will be further elaborated upon in Improving ML-KEM and ML-DSA on OpenTitan, to appear at CHES 2026, demonstrating a sustained commitment to both research and practical implementation. ZeroRISC provided an open-source, production-grade secure silicon platform, fostering an iterative process where academic insights directly informed commercial development. Simultaneously, operating frequency improved by 36 to 75 percent with minimal impact on chip area.

These gains were not simply theoretical; ZeroRISC engineers refined and hardened the results, reducing ML-DSA stack usage by over 90 percent through memory optimizations and streamlining hardware interfaces to minimize processor delays. The resulting Cryptolib library supports a broad range of classical algorithms, including AES, SHA2/3, and RSA, while also incorporating hardware-accelerated implementations of ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA. The SLH-DSA implementation has been in production since the earliest chip samples, enabling post-quantum secure boot functionality from the outset.

The demand for robust cryptographic solutions is intensifying as industries prepare for the advent of quantum computing, pushing developers to optimize existing algorithms and accelerate the adoption of post-quantum cryptography. Improvements to the KMAC hardware interface and novel rejection sampling techniques further reduced cycle counts, effectively eliminating processor stalls for ML-KEM. This entire lattice cryptography capability is configurable, allowing developers to selectively include or exclude PQC hardware extensions based on specific needs.

ZeroRISC is actively bridging the gap between academic cryptographic research and practical, production-ready hardware with the full open-source release of Cryptolib, a cryptographic stack supporting both established classical algorithms and the newly standardized post-quantum cryptography from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The library’s modular architecture allows for selective algorithm inclusion, and it features robust testing infrastructure with functional tests and automated validation against NIST vectors.