Finesse accepted by ISCA 2025: agile software-hardware co-design for pairing-based cryptography

👏 Paper title: Finesse: An Agile Design Framework for Pairing-based Cryptography via Software/Hardware Co-Design.

Finesse addresses the long design cycle and limited flexibility of accelerators for pairing-based cryptography. Pairing workloads are important for modern cryptographic applications, but changing algorithms, curve parameters, and system requirements can make fixed accelerator designs difficult to maintain.

The framework combines a specialized compiler, multi-granularity simulation, a unified IR/ISA abstraction, and parameterized pipelined hardware. This software-hardware co-design flow enables rapid design-space exploration and faster iteration while delivering high-throughput pairing acceleration across different curve families and hardware configurations.

Finesse is valuable because pairing-based cryptography has complex arithmetic kernels and diverse parameter choices. A fixed-function accelerator may be fast for one configuration but difficult to adapt as cryptographic requirements evolve.

By providing a reusable design framework, Finesse lets software and hardware decisions be explored together. This shortens the path from algorithm specification to efficient accelerator implementation and helps make high-performance cryptographic hardware more agile.

GitHub: BUAA-CI-LAB/Finesse

“Tianwei Pan presented the Finesse framework at the ISCA 2025 conference in Tokyo.”