The Performance Analysis and Hardware Acceleration of Crypto-computations for Enhanced Security

Abstract

Security is very important in modern life due to most information is now stored in digital format. A good security mechanism will keep information secrecy and integrity, hence, plays an important role in modern information exchange. However, cryptography algorithms are extremely expensive in terms of execution time. To make data not easily being cracked, many arithmetic and logical operations will be executed in the encryption/decryption process with many data movement. This means the cryptographic applications are both computation and memory intensive. Using a general-purpose processor for this scenario would not be very cost-effective. This study addresses this problem. Compared to the previous designs, we used a performance analyzer to identify “hotspot” functions across a set of benchmarks. The hotspot function consumes a substantial amount of the execution time of the specific algorithm. Then we translate these hotspot functions into hardware accelerators to improve the performance. Overall we achieve 34 – 83 folds of speedup.