General-purpose FPGA platform for efficient encryption and hashing

Many applications require protection of secret or sensitive information, from sensor nodes and embedded applications to large distributed systems. The confidentiality of data can be protected by encryption using symmetric-key ciphers, and the integrity of the data can be ensured by using a cryptographic hash function to calculate a "digital fingerprint." In this paper, we propose reconfigurable FPGA hardware components that enable rapid deployment of cryptographic and other algorithms. The novelty of our hardware components is in their general-purpose design which enables easy mappings of algorithms to allow customizations of data protection for different usage scenarios. Since we utilize only a small part of an FPGA chip, our design can be readily integrated with other processing needs of a mobile device, a sensor node or a System-on-Chip. Important block ciphers like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as well as advanced cryptographic hash algorithms like Whirlpool map ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ASAP
• Authors: Jakub Szefer, Yu-Yuan Chen, Ruby B. Lee
• Keywords: ASAP 2010, Cryptographic Hash, Cryptographic Hash Functions, Hardware, Sensor Node