High-performance low-energy implementation of cryptographic algorithms on a programmable SoC for IoT devices

Abstract

Due to severe power and timing constraints of the "things" in the Internet of things (IoT), cryptography is expensive for these devices. Custom hardware provides a viable solution. However, implementations of cryptographic algorithms in the devices need to be upgraded frequently compared to the longevity of these "things". Therefore, there is a critical need for reconfigurable, low-power and high-performance cryptography implementations for IoT devices. In this paper, we propose to use an FPGA as the reconfigurable substrate for cryptographic operations. We demonstrate our proposed approach on a Zedboard, which has two ARM cores and a Zynq FPGA. The implemented cryptographic algorithms include symmetric cryptography, asymmetric cryptography, and secure hash functions. We also integrate our cryptographic engines with the OpenSSL library to inherit the library's support for block cipher modes. Our approach shows that the FPGA-based reconfigurable cryptographic components consume between 1.8× and 4033× less energy and run between 1.6× and 2983× faster than the software implementation. At the same time, the FPGA implementation of cryptographic operations is more flexible compared to custom hardware implementations of cryptographic components.