The Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy is part of a new open-source initiative called Pavona
The illustration highlights the complexity of conventional silicon designs compared to the Pavona model.
© Pavona
To the point
- Quantum-resistant encryption schemes are currently not readily available for mass implementation in special-purpose hardware
- Pavona is a new open-source silicon ecosystem hosted by GlobalPlatform that brings together a community of industry leaders and major academic institutions to help accelerate secure-by-design, modular silicon through reusable building blocks, open collaboration, and production-ready foundations.
- MPI-SP joins Pavona as one of the founding members to ensure commercial-grade integration of our research.
The growing threat posed by quantum computers has accelerated the development of quantum-resistant encryption technologies. These new cryptographic standards are now being adopted across a wide range of applications, from internet search platforms to secure messaging services. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy played a key role in the development of three leading post-quantum cryptographic schemes: Kyber (ML-KEM), Dilithium (ML-DSA), and SPHINCS+ (SLH-DSA).
Despite this progress, one critical area remains particularly vulnerable to future quantum attacks: specialized hardware. To address this challenge, the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy has joined a major open-source silicon initiative focused on integrating quantum-resistant standards into hardware-based security solutions.
At the center of this initiative is Pavona, a new open-source silicon ecosystem hosted by GlobalPlatform. Pavona brings together industry leaders and prominent academic institutions to accelerate the development of secure-by-design modular silicon through reusable components, open collaboration, and production-ready infrastructure.
This collaboration enables our researchers to work closely with hardware-security experts, receive direct industry feedback, and further align scientific research with practical real-world applications.
A recent example of this cooperation includes a multi-year hardware-software co-design project involving ZeroRISC, the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Fraunhofer AISEC, and Academia Sinica. The partners recently presented results demonstrating significant performance gains for the newly standardized ML-KEM and ML-DSA post-quantum algorithms on embedded silicon. Their work achieved performance improvements of six to nine times, alongside 36-75% increases in maximum operating frequency, all while maintaining near-zero additional area cost.
"Our collaboration on post-quantum cryptography for Pavona demonstrates what the open-source silicon model uniquely enables: peer-reviewed research with a direct path to commercial-grade integration," said Peter Schwabe, Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy.
Background Information
Pavona is an open-source silicon ecosystem hosted by GlobalPlatform that combines reusable silicon components, production-grade tooling, certification-aware design, and community governance to accelerate the development of secure and trustworthy hardware. Source code, CI results, getting-started examples, and documentation are available at www.pavona.org.
