Energy Efficient Hardware Design for Securing the Internet-of-Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly growing field that holds potential to transform our everyday lives by placing tiny devices and sensors everywhere. The ubiquity and scale of IoT devices require them to be extremely energy efficient. Given the physical exposure to malicious agents, security is a critical challenge within the constrained resources. This dissertation presents energy-efficient hardware designs for IoT security. First, this dissertation presents a lightweight Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) accelerator design. By analyzing the algorithm, a novel method to manipulate two internal steps to eliminate storage registers and replace flip-flops with latches to save area is discovered. The proposed AES accelerator achieves state-of-art area and energy efficiency. Second, the inflexibility and high Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs of Application-Specific-Integrated-Circuits (ASICs) motivate a more flexible solution. This dissertation presents a reconfigurable cryptographic processor, called Recryptor, which achieves performance and energy improvements for a wide range of security algorithms across public key/secret key cryptography and hash functions. The proposed design employs circuit techniques in-memory and near-memory computing and is more resilient to power analysis attack. In addition, a simulator for in-memory computation is proposed. It is of high cost to design and evaluate new-architecture like in-memory computing in Register-transfer level (RTL). A C-based simulator is designed to enable fast design space exploration and large workload simulations. Elliptic curve arithmetic and Galois counter mode are evaluated in this work. Lastly, an error resilient register circuit, called iRazor, is designed to tolerate unpredictable variations in manufacturing process operating temperature and voltage of VLSI systems. When integrated into an ARM processor, this adaptive approach outperforms competing industrial techniques such as frequency binning and canary circuits in performance and energy.PHDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147546/1/zhyiqun_1.pd