Zvknhk Moves to the Official RISC-V PQC Repository

Version 0.1 of the RISC-V Post-Quantum Cryptography specification, including the draft Zvknhk Vector Keccak extension, is now available as a stable PDF. The specification source and supporting software are maintained together in the official RISC-V International repository.

Note that earlier development locations for the specification, Spike patches, and tests are being marked as historical.

Building the Specification

Clone the repository with its document resources and run the standard build:

git clone https://github.com/riscv/riscv-pqc.git
cd riscv-pqc
git submodule update --init docs-resources
make build

The build uses the RISC-V documentation container when Docker is available, or local AsciiDoctor tools otherwise, and writes the PDF and HTML documents under build/.

Simulator and OpenSSL Support

The same repository now contains Spike, QEMU, OpenSSL, and conformance-test support. In particular, Zvknhk is available in both user-mode and system-mode QEMU; the official QEMU build and run instructions cover the setup and test targets.

Karu64 implements the new encoding and fixed-group semantics and matches the official Spike and QEMU models. KaruDeb now builds the repository’s Zvknhk-enabled OpenSSL and PQC benchmarks, runs them under the official QEMU support, and packages them for execution on Karu hardware.

Our updated PQC and Keccak on Karu article has the encoding changes and performance background.