Reliable and High-Performance Hardware Architectures for the Advanced Encryption Standard/Galois Counter Mode

The high level of security and the fast hardware and software implementations of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) have made it the first choice for many critical applications. Since its acceptance as the adopted symmetric-key algorithm, the AES has been utilized in various security-constrained applications, many of which are power and resource constrained and require reliable and efficient hardware implementations. In this thesis, first, we investigate the AES algorithm from the concurrent fault detection point of view. We note that in addition to the efficiency requirements of the AES, it must be reliable against transient and permanent internal faults or malicious faults aiming at revealing the secret key. This reliability analysis and proposing efficient and effective fault detection schemes are essential because fault attacks have become a serious concern in cryptographic applications. Therefore, we propose, design, and implement various novel concurrent fault detection schemes for different AES hardware architectures. These include different structure-dependent and independent approaches for detecting single and multiple stuck-at faults using single and multi-bit signatures. The recently standardized authentication mode of the AES, i.e., Galois/Counter Mode (GCM), is also considered in this thesis. We propose efficient architectures for the AES-GCM algorithm. In this regard, we investigate the AES algorithm and we propose low-complexity and low-power hardware implementations for it, emphasizing on its nonlinear transformation, i.e., SubByes (S-boxes). We present new formulations for this transformation and through exhaustive hardware implementations, we show that the proposed architectures outperform their counterparts in terms of efficiency. Moreover, we present parallel, high-performance new schemes for the hardware implementations of the GCM to improve its throughput and reduce its latency. The performance of the proposed efficient architectures for the AES-GCM and their fault detection approaches are benchmarked using application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware platforms. Our comparison results show that the proposed hardware architectures outperform their existing counterparts in terms of efficiency and fault detection capability

An IoT Endpoint System-on-Chip for Secure and Energy-Efficient Near-Sensor Analytics

Near-sensor data analytics is a promising direction for IoT endpoints, as it minimizes energy spent on communication and reduces network load - but it also poses security concerns, as valuable data is stored or sent over the network at various stages of the analytics pipeline. Using encryption to protect sensitive data at the boundary of the on-chip analytics engine is a way to address data security issues. To cope with the combined workload of analytics and encryption in a tight power envelope, we propose Fulmine, a System-on-Chip based on a tightly-coupled multi-core cluster augmented with specialized blocks for compute-intensive data processing and encryption functions, supporting software programmability for regular computing tasks. The Fulmine SoC, fabricated in 65nm technology, consumes less than 20mW on average at 0.8V achieving an efficiency of up to 70pJ/B in encryption, 50pJ/px in convolution, or up to 25MIPS/mW in software. As a strong argument for real-life flexible application of our platform, we show experimental results for three secure analytics use cases: secure autonomous aerial surveillance with a state-of-the-art deep CNN consuming 3.16pJ per equivalent RISC op; local CNN-based face detection with secured remote recognition in 5.74pJ/op; and seizure detection with encrypted data collection from EEG within 12.7pJ/op.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication to the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems - I: Regular Paper

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

An Energy-Efficient Reconfigurable DTLS Cryptographic Engine for Securing Internet-of-Things Applications

This paper presents the first hardware implementation of the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol to enable end-to-end security for the Internet of Things (IoT). A key component of this design is a reconfigurable prime field elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) accelerator, which is 238x and 9x more energy-efficient compared to software and state-of-the-art hardware respectively. Our full hardware implementation of the DTLS 1.3 protocol provides 438x improvement in energy-efficiency over software, along with code size and data memory usage as low as 8 KB and 3 KB respectively. The cryptographic accelerators are coupled with an on-chip low-power RISC-V processor to benchmark applications beyond DTLS with up to two orders of magnitude energy savings. The test chip, fabricated in 65 nm CMOS, demonstrates hardware-accelerated DTLS sessions while consuming 44.08 uJ per handshake, and 0.89 nJ per byte of encrypted data at 16 MHz and 0.8 V.Comment: Published in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC

A Multiple Bit Parity Fault Detection Scheme for The Advanced Encryption Standard Galois/Counter Mode

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric-key block cipher for electronic data announced by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. The encryption process is based on symmetric key (using the same key for both encryption and decryption) for block encryption of 128, 192, and 256 bits in size. AES and its standardized authentication Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) have been adopted in numerous security-based applications. GCM is a mode of operation for AES symmetric key cryptographic block ciphers, which has been selected for its high throughput rates in high speed communication channels. The GCM is an algorithm for authenticated encryption to provide both data authenticity and confidentiality that can be achieved with reasonable hardware resources. The hardware implementation of the AES-GCM demands tremendous amount of logic blocks and gates. Due to natural faults or intrusion attacks, faulty outputs in different logic blocks of the AES-GCM module results in erroneous output. There exist plenty of specific literature on methods of fault detection in the AES section of the AES-GCM. In this thesis, we consider a novel fault detection of the GCM section using parity prediction. For the purpose of fault detection in GCM, two independent methods are proposed. First, a new technique of fault detection using parity prediction for the entire GCM loop is presented. Then, matrix based CRC multiple-bit parity prediction schemes are developed and implemented. As a result, we achieve the fault coverage of about 99% with the longest path delay and area overhead of 23% and 10.9% respectively. The false alarm is 0.12% which can be ignored based on the number of injected faults

Chiffrement authentifié sur FPGAs de la partie reconfigurable à la partie static

Communication systems need to access, store, manipulate, or communicate sensitive information. Therefore, cryptographic primitives such as hash functions and block ciphers are deployed to provide encryption and authentication. Recently, techniques have been invented to combine encryption and authentication into a single algorithm which is called Authenticated Encryption (AE). Combining these two security services in hardware produces better performance compared to two separated algorithms since authentication and encryption can share a part of the computation. Because of combining the programmability with the performance ofcustom hardware, FPGAs become more common as an implementation target for such algorithms. The first part of this thesis is devoted to efficient and high-speed FPGA-based architectures of AE algorithms, AES-GCM and AEGIS-128, in order to be used in the reconfigurable part of FPGAs to support security services of communication systems. Our focus on the state of the art leads to the introduction of high-speed architectures for slow changing keys applications like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Furthermore, we present an efficient method for implementing the GF(2¹²⁸) multiplier, which is responsible for the authentication task in AES-GCM, to support high-speed applications. Additionally, an efficient AEGIS-128is also implemented using only five AES rounds. Our hardware implementations were evaluated using Virtex-5 and Virtex-4 FPGAs. The performance of the presented architectures (Thr./Slices) outperforms the previously reported ones.The second part of the thesis presents techniques for low cost solutions in order to secure the reconfiguration of FPGAs. We present different ranges of low cost implementations of AES-GCM, AES-CCM, and AEGIS-128, which are used in the static part of the FPGA in order to decrypt and authenticate the FPGA bitstream. Presented ASIC architectures were evaluated using 90 and 65 nm technologies and they present better performance compared to the previous work.Les systèmes de communication ont besoin d'accéder, stocker, manipuler, ou de communiquer des informations sensibles. Par conséquent, les primitives cryptographiques tels que les fonctions de hachage et le chiffrement par blocs sont déployés pour fournir le cryptage et l'authentification. Récemment, des techniques ont été inventés pour combiner cryptage et d'authentification en un seul algorithme qui est appelé authentifiés Encryption (AE). La combinaison de ces deux services de sécurité dans le matériel de meilleures performances par rapport aux deux algorithmes séparés puisque l'authentification et le cryptage peuvent partager une partie du calcul. En raison de la combinaison de la programmation de l'exécution de matériel personnalisé, FPGA deviennent plus communs comme cible d'une mise en œuvre de ces algorithmes. La première partie de cette thèse est consacrée aux architectures d'algorithmes AE, AES-GCM et AEGIS-128 à base de FPGA efficaces et à grande vitesse, afin d'être utilisé dans la partie reconfigurable FPGA pour soutenir les services de sécurité des systèmes de communication. Notre focalisation sur l'état de l'art conduit à la mise en place d'architectures à haute vitesse pour les applications lentes touches changeantes comme les réseaux privés virtuels (VPN). En outre, nous présentons un procédé efficace pour mettre en œuvre le GF(2¹²⁸) multiplicateur, qui est responsable de la tâche d'authentification en AES-GCM, pour supporter les applications à grande vitesse. En outre, un système efficace AEGIS-128 est également mis en œuvre en utilisant seulement cinq tours AES. Nos réalisations matérielles ont été évaluées à l'aide Virtex-5 et Virtex-4 FPGA. La performance des architectures présentées (Thr. / Parts) surpasse ceux signalés précédemment. La deuxième partie de la thèse présente des techniques pour des solutions à faible coût afin de garantir la reconfiguration du FPGA. Nous présentons différentes gammes de mises en œuvre à faible coût de AES-GCM, AES-CCM, et AEGIS-128, qui sont utilisés dans la partie statique du FPGA afin de décrypter et authentifier le bitstream FPGA. Architectures ASIC présentées ont été évaluées à l'aide de 90 et 65 technologies nm et présentent de meilleures performances par rapport aux travaux antérieurs

FPGA based technical solutions for high throughput data processing and encryption for 5G communication: A review

The field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices are ideal solutions for high-speed processing applications, given their flexibility, parallel processing capability, and power efficiency. In this review paper, at first, an overview of the key applications of FPGA-based platforms in 5G networks/systems is presented, exploiting the improved performances offered by such devices. FPGA-based implementations of cloud radio access network (C-RAN) accelerators, network function virtualization (NFV)-based network slicers, cognitive radio systems, and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channel characterizers are the main considered applications that can benefit from the high processing rate, power efficiency and flexibility of FPGAs. Furthermore, the implementations of encryption/decryption algorithms by employing the Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+MPSoC ZCU102 FPGA platform are discussed, and then we introduce our high-speed and lightweight implementation of the well-known AES-128 algorithm, developed on the same FPGA platform, and comparing it with similar solutions already published in the literature. The comparison results indicate that our AES-128 implementation enables efficient hardware usage for a given data-rate (up to 28.16 Gbit/s), resulting in higher efficiency (8.64 Mbps/slice) than other considered solutions. Finally, the applications of the ZCU102 platform for high-speed processing are explored, such as image and signal processing, visual recognition, and hardware resource management

PIM-Enclave: Bringing Confidential Computation Inside Memory

Demand for data-intensive workloads and confidential computing are the prominent research directions shaping the future of cloud computing. Computer architectures are evolving to accommodate the computing of large data better. Protecting the computation of sensitive data is also an imperative yet challenging objective; processor-supported secure enclaves serve as the key element in confidential computing in the cloud. However, side-channel attacks are threatening their security boundaries. The current processor architectures consume a considerable portion of its cycles in moving data. Near data computation is a promising approach that minimizes redundant data movement by placing computation inside storage. In this paper, we present a novel design for Processing-In-Memory (PIM) as a data-intensive workload accelerator for confidential computing. Based on our observation that moving computation closer to memory can achieve efficiency of computation and confidentiality of the processed information simultaneously, we study the advantages of confidential computing \emph{inside} memory. We then explain our security model and programming model developed for PIM-based computation offloading. We construct our findings into a software-hardware co-design, which we call PIM-Enclave. Our design illustrates the advantages of PIM-based confidential computing acceleration. Our evaluation shows PIM-Enclave can provide a side-channel resistant secure computation offloading and run data-intensive applications with negligible performance overhead compared to baseline PIM model

Security enhancements for FPGA-based MPSoCs: a boot-to-runtime protection flow for an embedded Linux-based system

International audienceNowadays, embedded systems become more and more complex: the hardware/software codesign approach is a method to create such systems in a single chip which can be based on reconfigurable technologies such as FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays). In such systems, data exchanges are a key point as they convey critical and confidential information and data are transmitted between several hardware modules and software layers. In case of an FPGA development life cycle, OS (Operating System) / data updates as runtime communications can be done through an insecure link: attackers can use this medium to make the system misbehave (malicious injection) or retrieve bitstream-related information (eavesdropping). Recent works propose solutions to securely boot a bitstream and the associated OS while runtime transactions are not protected. This work proposes a full boot-to-runtime protection flow of an embedded Linux kernel during boot and confidentiality/integrity protection of the external memory containing the kernel and the main application code/data. This work shows that such a solution with hardware components induces an area occupancy of 10% of a xc6vlx240t Virtex-6 FPGA while having an improved throughput for Linux booting and lowlatency security for runtime protection