OptHQC: Optimize HQC for High-Performance Post-Quantum Cryptography

TL;DR

OptHQC significantly enhances the performance of the HQC post-quantum cryptography scheme by optimizing key operations, achieving a 55% speedup through data sparsity exploitation, instruction-level acceleration, and memory access improvements.

Contribution

This paper introduces OptHQC, an optimized implementation of HQC that incorporates multiple computational enhancements for high-performance post-quantum cryptography.

Findings

Achieves 55% average speedup over reference HQC implementation

Optimizes polynomial operations using data sparsity techniques

Leverages AVX2 instructions for faster hash computations

Abstract

As post-quantum cryptography (PQC) becomes increasingly critical for securing future communication systems, the performance overhead introduced by quantum-resistant algorithms presents a major computing challenge. HQC (Hamming Quasi-Cyclic) is a newly standardized code-based PQC scheme designed to replace classical key exchange methods. In this paper, we propose OptHQC, an optimized implementation of the HQC scheme to deliver high-performance cryptographic operations. Our approach provides a comprehensive analysis of each computational blocks in HQC and introduces optimizations across all three stages: key generation, encryption, and decryption. We first exploit data-level sparsity in vector multiplication to accelerate polynomial operations during vector generation. We then leverage instruction-level acceleration (e.g., AVX2) in hash computation to further improve performance. Last, we transform multiplication into lookup table indexing and optimize memory access patterns in syndrome computation and error vector recovery, which are the most computationally intensive operations in HQC. Overall, OptHQC achieves an average 55% speedup over the reference HQC implementation on CPU.