Post-quantum cryptography can defeat the codebreaking abilities of future quantum computers, but it is computationally hungry, raising power consumption by two to three orders of magnitude: a prohibitive cost for a pacemaker. MIT researchers from the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, working with Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Broad Institute under senior author Anantha Chandrakasan, have built a microchip that squares the circle, presented at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference.
The chip, about the size of a fine needle tip, runs two different post-quantum schemes and shares computing resources between them, so that if one algorithm is ever broken the other remains in service. It integrates an on-chip random number generator, targeted defences against power side-channel attacks, and early fault detection that halts operations when voltage glitches suggest tampering. Across the techniques the team compared, it achieved 20 to 60 times higher energy efficiency, more than an order of magnitude beyond prior designs.
Funded in part by ARPA-H, the work addresses a quietly urgent problem: implanted and wearable medical devices transmit intimate physiological data wirelessly and can be updated remotely, yet must run for years on tiny batteries. Making quantum-resistant encryption affordable at these tiny power budgets could therefore protect an entire generation of biomedical devices well before the threat itself arrives.