Cryptographie coprocessor design for IoT sensor nodes

Abstract

Together with the popularity of internet of things (IoT), the information security in IoT is becoming an urgent issue. In this paper, a cryptographic coprocessor is designed to provide security for IoT sensor nodes. This design incorporates the application-specific instruction set to support popular cryptography algorithms like advanced encryption standard (AES) and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The tailored instruction provides good flexibility, high energy efficiency and low latency. Local instruction and data ram is integrated into our coprocessor to reduce the instruction transfer between embedded processor and the coprocessor. Our work was synthesized under TSMC 65 nm technology. The measurement results show that our design consumes 32.7 uJ for each ECC point multiplication and 3 nJ for each AES encryption and decryption when working at 10 MHz.