Designing Flexible, Energy Efficient and Secure Wireless Solutions for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging concept where ubiquitous physical objects (things) consisting of sensor, transceiver, processing hardware and software are interconnected via the Internet. The information collected by individual IoT nodes is shared among other often heterogeneous devices and over the Internet. This dissertation presents flexible, energy efficient and secure wireless solutions in the IoT application domain. System design and architecture designs are discussed envisioning a near-future world where wireless communication among heterogeneous IoT devices are seamlessly enabled. Firstly, an energy-autonomous wireless communication system for ultra-small, ultra-low power IoT platforms is presented. To achieve orders of magnitude energy efficiency improvement, a comprehensive system-level framework that jointly optimizes various system parameters is developed. A new synchronization protocol and modulation schemes are specified for energy-scarce ultra-small IoT nodes. The dynamic link adaptation is proposed to guarantee the ultra-small node to always operate in the most energy efficiency mode, given an operating scenario. The outcome is a truly energy-optimized wireless communication system to enable various new applications such as implanted smart-dust devices. Secondly, a configurable Software Defined Radio (SDR) baseband processor is designed and shown to be an efficient platform on which to execute several IoT wireless standards. It is a custom SIMD execution model coupled with a scalar unit and several architectural optimizations: streaming registers, variable bitwidth, dedicated ALUs, and an optimized reduction network. Voltage scaling and clock gating are employed to further reduce the power, with a more than a 100% time margin reserved for reliable operation in the near-threshold region. Two upper bound systems are evaluated. A comprehensive power/area estimation indicates that the overhead of realizing SDR flexibility is insignificant. The benefit of baseband SDR is quantified and evaluated. To further augment the benefits of a flexible baseband solution and to address the security issue of IoT connectivity, a light-weight Galois Field (GF) processor is proposed. This processor enables both energy-efficient block coding and symmetric/asymmetric cryptography kernel processing for a wide range of GF sizes (2^m, m = 2, 3, ..., 233) and arbitrary irreducible polynomials. Program directed connections among primitive GF arithmetic units enable dynamically configured parallelism to efficiently perform either four-way SIMD GF operations, including multiplicative inverse, or a long bit-width GF product in a single cycle. This demonstrates the feasibility of a unified architecture to enable error correction coding flexibility and secure wireless communication in the low power IoT domain.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137164/1/yajchen_1.pd

VLSI implementation of AES algorithm

In the present era of information processing through computers and access of private information over the internet like bank account information even the transaction of money, business deal through video conferencing, encryption of the messages in various forms has become inevitable. There are mainly two types of encryption algorithms, private key (also called symmetric key having single key for encryption and decryption) and public key (separate key for encryption and decryption). In the present work, hardware optimization for AES architecture has been done in different stages. The hardware comparison results show that as AES architecture has critical path delay of 9.78 ns when conventional s-box is used, whereas it has critical path delay of 8.17 ns using proposed s-box architecture. The total clock cycles required to encrypt 128 bits of data using proposed AES architecture are 86 and therefore, throughput of the AES design in Spartan-6 of Xilinx FPGA is approximately 182.2 Mbits/s. To achieve the very high speed, full custom design of s-box in composite field has been done for the proposed s-box architecture in Cadence Virtuoso. The novel XOR gate is proposed for use in s-box design which is efficient in terms of delay and power along with high noise margin. The implementation has been done in 180 nm UMC technology. Total dynamic power in the proposed XOR gate is 0.63 µW as compared to 5.27 µW in the existing design of XOR. The designed s-box using proposed XOR occupies a total area of 27348 µm2. The s-box chip consumes 22.6 µW dynamic power and has 8.2 ns delay after post layout simulation has been performed

Analysis of Parallel Montgomery Multiplication in CUDA

For a given level of security, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) offers improved efficiency over classic public key implementations. Point multiplication is the most common operation in ECC and, consequently, any significant improvement in perfor- mance will likely require accelerating point multiplication. In ECC, the Montgomery algorithm is widely used for point multiplication. The primary purpose of this project is to implement and analyze a parallel implementation of the Montgomery algorithm as it is used in ECC. Specifically, the performance of CPU-based Montgomery multiplication and a GPU-based implementation in CUDA are compared

Design and analysis of an FPGA-based, multi-processor HW-SW system for SCC applications

The last 30 years have seen an increase in the complexity of embedded systems from a collection of simple circuits to systems consisting of multiple processors managing a wide variety of devices. This ever increasing complexity frequently requires that high assurance, fail-safe and secure design techniques be applied to protect against possible failures and breaches. To facilitate the implementation of these embedded systems in an efficient way, the FPGA industry recently created new families of devices. New features added to these devices include anti-tamper monitoring, bit stream encryption, and optimized routing architectures for physical and functional logic partition isolation. These devices have high capacities and are capable of implementing processors using their reprogrammable logic structures. This allows for an unprecedented level of hardware and software interaction within a single FPGA chip. High assurance and fail-safe systems can now be implemented within the reconfigurable hardware fabric of an FPGA, enabling these systems to maintain flexibility and achieve high performance while providing a high level of data security. The objective of this thesis was to design and analyze an FPGA-based system containing two isolated, softcore Nios processors that share data through two crypto-engines. FPGA-based single-chip cryptographic (SCC) techniques were employed to ensure proper component isolation when the design is placed on a device supporting the appropriate security primitives. Each crypto-engine is an implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), operating in Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) for both encryption and authentication. The features of the microprocessors and architectures of the AES crypto-engines were varied with the goal of determining combinations which best target high performance, minimal hardware usage, or a combination of the two

Efficient implementation of elliptic curve cryptography.

Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC) were introduced in 1985 by Neal Koblitz and Victor Miller. Small key size made elliptic curve attractive for public key cryptosystem implementation. This thesis introduces solutions of efficient implementation of ECC in algorithmic level and in computation level. In algorithmic level, a fast parallel elliptic curve scalar multiplication algorithm based on a dual-processor hardware system is developed. The method has an average computation time of n3 Elliptic Curve Point Addition on an n-bit scalar. The improvement is n Elliptic Curve Point Doubling compared to conventional methods. When a proper coordinate system and binary representation for the scalar k is used the average execution time will be as low as n Elliptic Curve Point Doubling, which makes this method about two times faster than conventional single processor multipliers using the same coordinate system. In computation level, a high performance elliptic curve processor (ECP) architecture is presented. The processor uses parallelism in finite field calculation to achieve high speed execution of scalar multiplication algorithm. The architecture relies on compile-time detection rather than of run-time detection of parallelism which results in less hardware. Implemented on FPGA, the proposed processor operates at 66MHz in GF(2 167) and performs scalar multiplication in 100muSec, which is considerably faster than recent implementations.Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .A57. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1446. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

Self-Partial and Dynamic Reconfiguration Implementation for AES using FPGA

This paper addresses efficient hardware/software implementation approaches for the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm and describes the design and performance testing algorithm for embedded system. Also, with the spread of reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) embedded cryptographic hardware became cost-effective. Nevertheless, it is worthy to note that nowadays, even hardwired cryptographic algorithms are not so safe. From another side, the self-reconfiguring platform is reported that enables an FPGA to dynamically reconfigure itself under the control of an embedded microprocessor. Hardware acceleration significantly increases the performance of embedded systems built on programmable logic. Allowing a FPGA-based MicroBlaze processor to self-select the coprocessors uses can help reduce area requirements and increase a system's versatility. The architecture proposed in this paper is an optimal hardware implementation algorithm and takes dynamic partially reconfigurable of FPGA. This implementation is good solution to preserve confidentiality and accessibility to the information in the numeric communication

FPGA Implementations of Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Tate Pairing over Binary Field

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is an alternative to traditional techniques for public key cryptography. It offers smaller key size without sacrificing security level. Tate pairing is a bilinear map used in identity based cryptography schemes. In a typical elliptic curve cryptosystem, elliptic curve point multiplication is the most computationally expensive component. Similarly, Tate pairing is also quite computationally expensive. Therefore, it is more attractive to implement the ECC and Tate pairing using hardware than using software. The bases of both ECC and Tate pairing are Galois field arithmetic units. In this thesis, I propose the FPGA implementations of the elliptic curve point multiplication in GF (2283) as well as Tate pairing computation on supersingular elliptic curve in GF (2283). I have designed and synthesized the elliptic curve point multiplication and Tate pairing module using Xilinx's FPGA, as well as synthesized all the Galois arithmetic units used in the designs. Experimental results demonstrate that the FPGA implementation can speedup the elliptic curve point multiplication by 31.6 times compared to software based implementation. The results also demonstrate that the FPGA implementation can speedup the Tate pairing computation by 152 times compared to software based implementation

Implementation of Elliptic Curve Crypto Processor and Its Performance Analysis

ECDSA stands for "Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm", its used to create a digital signature of data (a file for example) in order to allow you toverify its authenticity without compromising its security. This paper presents the architecture of finite field multiplication. The proposed multiplier is hybrid Karatsuba multiplier used in this processor. For multiplicative inverse we choose the Itoh-Tsujii Algorithm (ITA). This work presents the design of high performance elliptic curve crypto processor (ECCP) for an elliptic curve over the finite field GF (2^233). The curve which we choose is the standard curve for the digital signature. The processor is synthesized for Xilinx FPGA

Hardware Obfuscation for Finite Field Algorithms

With the rise of computing devices, the security robustness of the devices has become of utmost importance. Companies invest huge sums of money, time and effort in security analysis and vulnerability testing of their software products. Bug bounty programs are held which incentivize security researchers for finding security holes in software. Once holes are found, software firms release security patches for their products. The semiconductor industry has flourished with accelerated innovation. Fabless manufacturing has reduced the time-to-market and lowered the cost of production of devices. Fabless paradigm has introduced trust issues among the hardware designers and manufacturers. Increasing dependence on computing devices in personal applications as well as in critical infrastructure has given a rise to hardware attacks on the devices in the last decade. Reverse engineering and IP theft are major challenges that have emerged for the electronics industry. Integrated circuit design companies experience a loss of billions of dollars because of malicious acts by untrustworthy parties involved in the design and fabrication process, and because of attacks by adversaries on the electronic devices in which the chips are embedded. To counter these attacks, researchers have been working extensively towards finding strong countermeasures. Hardware obfuscation techniques make the reverse engineering of device design and functionality difficult for the adversary. The goal is to conceal or lock the underlying intellectual property of the integrated circuit. Obfuscation in hardware circuits can be implemented to hide the gate-level design, layout and the IP cores. Our work presents a novel hardware obfuscation design through reconfigurable finite field arithmetic units, which can be employed in various error correction and cryptographic algorithms. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods are verified by an obfuscated Reformulated Inversion-less Berlekamp-Massey (RiBM) architecture based Reed-Solomon decoder. Our experimental results show the hardware implementation of RiBM based Reed-Solomon decoder built using reconfigurable field multiplier designs. The proposed design provides only very low overhead with improved security by obfuscating the functionality and the outputs. The design proposed in our work can also be implemented in hardware designs of other algorithms that are based on finite field arithmetic. However, our main motivation was to target encryption and decryption circuits which store and process sensitive data and are used in critical applications