Hardware optimizations for crypto implementations (Invited paper)

Latency, Area, and Power are three important metrics that a VLSI designer wants to optimize. However, often one of these may have to be optimized at the cost of another or the other two. Depending on the application scenario, choice of the metric to optimize is made. In this paper, we consider hardware implementations of a number of cryptographic primitives and present a number of optimizations. We consider three areas of cryptoengineering. They are building physical unclonable functions (PUFs), implementing encryption/decryption algorithms, and side channel proof crypto implementations. The techniques we employ range from area optimization through customized multiplexer design, fusing multiple operations into a single hardware element, folding and unrolling of iterative algorithms, creating reconfigurable implementations to achieve multiple operations with the same set of hardware elements, to techniques of obfuscation to defeat fault injection based attacks on the crypto implementation. All the proposed and existing designs are implemented with 45 nm CMOS library.