A paper titled “A Crypto-Agile Mixed-Radix NTT Accelerator for Negacyclic and Trinomial Rings,” co-authored by Lee Jae-seok (Master’s student), Shin Dong-hyun and Kim Young-beom (Ph.D. candidates), and Professor Seo SeogChung, has been accepted for publication in *IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems* (TCHES), the most prestigious academic journal in the field of cryptographic implementation, in Issue 1, 2027. This achievement follows the research team’s Grand Prize win at the 2025 Quantum-Resistant Cryptography Transition Technology Competition.
 
This research was undertaken to bridge the gap between software and hardware implementation technologies for quantum-resistant cryptography. While high-speed computation techniques supporting various polynomial structures have been studied in the software domain, existing hardware research has primarily focused on Radix-2-based computational architectures, making it difficult to efficiently process different lattice-based cryptosystems on a single hardware platform.
 
To overcome these limitations, the research team proposed the world’s first Mixed-Radix NTT accelerator, which integrates Radix-2, Radix-3, and Trinomial-based number-theoretic transformations (NTT) and inverse transformations (INTT) into a single computational architecture. To achieve this, they designed an architecture in which different cryptographic algorithms share computational circuits and memory, and verified its operation on an FPGA. In particular, by providing integrated support for the core operations of various lattice-based algorithms—such as ML-KEM and ML-DSA from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and HAETAE, SMAUG-T, and NTRU+ from the Korean Post-Quantum Cryptography Contest (KpqC)—the team implemented “crypto-agility” at the hardware level, enabling a flexible response to changes in cryptographic standards or algorithms.
  
Meanwhile, the Cryptography and Security Engineering Laboratory at Kookmin University has achieved the publication or acceptance of a total of five papers: two in TCHES 2026, Issue 2; one in Issue 4; and two in 2027, Issue 1. In particular, the lab has achieved world-class research results across a variety of computing environments, ranging from the acceleration of GPU-based cryptographic operations to the optimization of quantum-resistant cryptography in ultra-lightweight embedded environments and the design of FPGA-based integrated hardware accelerators. These achievements demonstrate the lab’s broad cryptographic implementation capabilities spanning both software and hardware, and are expected to contribute to the nation’s transition to quantum-resistant cryptography and the strengthening of the international competitiveness of domestic cryptographic technology.