Implementing the Draft RISC-V Scalar Cryptography Extensions

Abstract

RISC-V is an increasingly popular, free and open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). Many standard extensions to RISC-V are currently being designed and evaluated, including one for accelerating cryptographic workloads. Unlike most incumbent ISAs which re-use existing large SIMD state and data-paths to accelerate cryptographic operations, RISC-V also adds support for smaller machines with narrow 32 and 64-bit data-paths. For embedded, IoT class devices, this significantly lowers the barrier to entry for secure and efficient accelerated cryptography. In this paper, we describe (to our knowledge) the first complete, free and open-source implementation of the draft 32-bit RISC-V Cryptography Extension. We detail the performance benefits for several important algorithms, and associated hardware costs. Our experiences help to guide the ongoing standardisation work and provide a platform for other researchers to experiment with a complete and representative CPU system, implementing the draft cryptography extension.