Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Study of the Kalray MPPA-256 Processor for Applications in Cryptology

Participants : Jérémie Detrey, Pierrick Gaudry [contact] .

A 5-month contract has been signed between Caramel (through Inria) and Kalray, a French company which has recently designed and manufactured the MPPA-256 processor, a 256-core VLIW architecture targeted at embedded applications. The objective of this contract was to study the performance of this processor in a cryptographic context. Several key arithmetic primitives, such as multi-precision modular arithmetic or polynomial multiplication in binary and ternary fields, were implemented and optimized to take advantage of the specific micro-architecture and instruction set of the VLIW cores of the MPPA-256. The results are encouraging and prompt us to explore further the possible benefits of this processor for cryptanalytic applications.