A PRISMA 2020-compliant systematic review that analyzes Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementations of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) from 2018 to 2025 reveals critical gaps between academic research and deployment reality.
Abstract
Modern blockchain systems impose distinct cryptographic requirements, including pairing-based signatures for Ethereum, multi-scalar multiplication (MSM) for zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), and post-quantum migration, which existing hardware implementations largely overlook. In this paper, we present a PRISMA 2020-compliant systematic review that analyzes Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementations of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) from 2018 to 2025. We evaluate these across four blockchain node categories: full nodes, light clients, ZKP provers, and validators. From 688 initial records, rigorous screening yielded 56 FPGA implementations, 16 ASIC designs, and 3 hybrid architectures. Our findings reveal critical gaps between academic research and deployment reality: there is minimal hardware support for the pairing-friendly curves essential for Layer-2 scaling and zkRollups, as well as a lack of hybrid architectures preparing for the imminent post-quantum transition. Performance analysis shows that FPGAs achieve moderate throughput with high energy efficiency (hundreds to thousands of operations per joule), while ASICs reach significantly higher performance at substantially greater costs. PQC schemes consistently exhibit notable area overhead and memory consumption. Crucially, side-channel security remains underaddressed, with no implementations achieving both high performance and validated resistance. To bridge these gaps, we extract four security-aware design patterns, establish a platform selection framework integrating throughput-cost-security trade-offs, and identify five research priorities: standardized benchmarking, hybrid architectures, validated security-performance co-design, energy-proportional implementations, and protocol-hardware co-optimization.
The study evaluates major post-quantum cryptographic primitives, assesses their suitability for blockchain environments, and proposes a layered architecture grounded in crypto-agility, defense-in-depth, and forward secrecy.
The analysis indicates a significant prevalence of lattice-based schemes, hybrid strategies, and integrations with blockchain technology, zero-knowledge proofs, federated learning, homomorphic encryption, AI, and Zero Trust architectures, as well as key gaps remain in side-channel evaluation, migration pathways, deployment costs, and real-world validation.
Rodrigo Jara Espinoza, Yohamin Nafit Pimentel Alarcon, Angelo Taco-Jimenez et al.· Interfases· 0 citations
By using PUF-generated responses as hardware-rooted seeds for mining and authentication, the framework removes the need for permanent secret storage and establishes a secure chain from device identity to consensus participation, making it suitable for practical deployment in industrial IoT, smart infrastructure, and other resource-constrained distributed systems.
B. Narayanapuram, J. Panda· IEEE Access· 0 citations
Objective The authors evaluated how quantum computing threatens the cryptographic primitives used in Bitcoin and other blockchain systems. These findings were translated into a standards-aligned post-quantum migration profile for healthcare ledgers, including consent, identity, provenance, audit, and encrypted off-chain data exchange. Methodology Narrative analysis, theoretical security analysis, and healthcare-oriented deployment mapping of classical public-key and hash primitives used in blockchain protocols were paired with an implementation-oriented migration profile based on finalized National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum standards. We summarize the mathematical assumptions underlying RSA, Elliptic Curve Cryptography/Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECC/ECDSA), and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-2/SHA-3-family) hash functions; analyze their susceptibility to Shor’s and Grover’s quantum algorithms; compare Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 203 Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Standard (ML-KEM), FIPS 204 Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard (ML-DSA), and FIPS 205 Stateless Hash-Based Digital Signature Standard (SLH-DSA); and map their distinct roles to healthcare-ledger authorization, auditability, identity, and encrypted off-chain exchange. The term Advanced Hybrid Module-LWE & Code-Based (AHMC) is used only as shorthand for a standards-aligned hybrid post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration profile and does not denote a proprietary product, a novel algorithm, or a new cryptographic primitive. Proposed adoption of hybrid, quantum-resistant cryptographic primitives for cryptocurrency wallets, transaction signatures, and ledger security during an interim migration period (hybrid classical + PQC, followed by PQC-only). Qualitative and implementation-oriented assessment of (1) break feasibility of RSA/ECC under Shor’s algorithm, (2) effective security reduction for hash functions under Grover’s algorithm, (3) security assumptions and composition requirements of a standards-aligned hybrid migration profile, (4) transaction-size and verification-cost impact, and (5) healthcare-specific implications for long-retention consent, identity, provenance, and audit records. Results Shor’s algorithm reduces integer factorization and discrete logarithms to polynomial time, directly compromising Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) and ECC/ECDSA once fault-tolerant, large-scale quantum computers exist. Grover’s algorithm yields a quadratic speedup for brute-force search, effectively halving the security margin of symmetric keys and hash functions at fixed output sizes. The AHMC-L1/L3/L5 profiles use ML-KEM-512/768/1024 for key establishment and ML-DSA-44/65/87 for transaction authentication, with SLH-DSA as a hash-based fallback. During a hybrid ECDSA+PQC migration, verification requires one classical and one PQC verification per authorization; transaction-size overhead is dominated by PQC signatures, approximately 2.4 KB for ML-DSA-44, 3.3 KB for ML-DSA-65, and 4.6 KB for ML-DSA-87 before script and encoding overhead. For healthcare ledgers, these findings support selective use of post-quantum signatures for: high-value state transitions, one-time public-key registration where possible, and continued off-chain storage of protected health information. Deployment suitability remains contingent on workflow-specific latency, storage, availability, key lifecycle, and side-channel testing. Conclusions Quantum risk to blockchain signatures has direct implications for healthcare systems that depend on long-lived consent, identity, provenance, and audit records. A staged, standards-aligned migration profile can preserve authorization and ledger verifiability while keeping protected health information off-chain. The AHMC label refers only to this migration profile, not to a new cryptographic primitive; healthcare adoption requires open implementations, empirical benchmarking, crypto-agile key governance, and side-channel-resistant engineering.
Rubayat Khan, Mazharul Karim, D. Roosan· Blockchain in Healthcare Tod...· 0 citations
By 2030, an estimated 40% of current cloud infrastructures may be rendered vulnerable by cryptanalytically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs).
This paper introduces a 4-tier security framework tailored for Quantumas-a-Service (QaaS) deployments, focusing on securing data-in-transit. Integrating 3 NIST-standardized post-quantum algorithms (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLHDSA), our architecture mitigates interception threats based on Shor's algorithm.
Emulation across an enterprise cloud topology demonstrates a maximum latency overhead of 17.7 milliseconds per TLS handshake under high-latency WAN conditions, ensuring high-availability operations without catastrophic fragmentation failure.
The proposed model demonstrates the viability of modern latticebased cryptography for live environments and provides a structured 3-phase transition roadmap for cloud service providers (CSPs) to achieve quantum-resilience seamlessly.
Unknown authors· Frontiers of Computer Scienc...· 0 citations
Open challenges including Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) performance, post-quantum migration, IoT key management, and regulatory alignment are discussed, followed by a research agenda for the post-quantum era.
Anah Hassan Bijik, Sojah Patrick Yakubu, Ibrahim Lawal et al.· International Journal of Adv...· 0 citations
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