Overview of research results on hardware-accelerated cryptography and security

This paper provides an overview of the research findings related to cryptographic hardware, acceleration of cryptanalytical algorithms, FPGA design automation and testing, as well as security service provisioning achieved by the author until the time of writing. The paper also refers to a few results developed in the framework of funded research projects which involved the author as a team member. The text briefly describes the implications of the main research results, indicating the corresponding publication and the essential insights behind each work

Research Activities on FPGA Design, Cryptographic Hardware, and Security Services

This paper reports on the main research results achieved by the author, including activities carried out in the context of funded Research Projects, until year 2012. The report presents an overview of the findings involving cryptographic hardware, as well as the results related to the acceleration of cryptanalytical algorithms. Another major research line involved FPGA design automation and testing. The above results were complemented by works on security service provisioning in distributed environments. The report presents an exhaustive description of all the scientific works derived from the above activities, indicating the essential insights behind each of them and the main results collected from the experimental evaluation

The HtComp Research Project: An Overview

This contribution reviews the main results of the HtComp project, a two-year research programme aiming at facilitating the integration of FPGA-based accelerators into general-purpose computing. The project covered the automated generation of HDL code from parallel applications written in traditional high-level software languages, as well as the customization of the processing, memory, and on-chip interconnect subsystems tailored on the application requirements. The ultimate outcome of the research was the introduction of methods and tools allowing software developers, particularly from the HPC domain, to access hardware-accelerated platforms incurring significantly reduced design complexity and overheads

Research works on electronic system-level design, FPGA testing, and security building blocks

This document presents an overview of the research activity carried out by the author until the date of writing. It is also meant to report on the main results generated by a few funded project involving the author as a team member. The activity covered a range of topics involving automated generation of on-chip multiprocessor systems from high-level code, with particular emphasis on the system interconnect and the memory subsystems, design automation and test techniques for hardware-reconfigurable technologies, the design of advanced hardware blocks for cryptographic and cryptanalytical applications, the implementation and evaluation of security services in distributed environments, with special focus on time-stamping and public-key certification services, as well as the interplay between security services and hardware reconfigurability. The document presents the main highlights from the published works spawned by each of the above research threads

Exploiting Outer Loops Vectorization in High Level Synthesis

Synthesis of DoAll loops is a key aspect of High Level Synthesis since they allow to easily exploit the potential parallelism provided by programmable devices. This type of parallelism can be implemented in several ways: by duplicating the implementation of body loop, by exploiting loop pipelining or by applying vectorization. In this paper a methodology for the synthesis of complex DoAll loops based on outer vectorization is proposed. Vectorization is not limited to the innermost loops: complex constructs such as nested loops, conditional constructs and function calls are supported. Experimental results on parallel benchmarks show up to 7.35x speed-up and up to 40 % reduction of area-delay product

A Configurable Shared Scratchpad Memory for GPU-like Processors

During the last years Field Programmable Gate Arrays and Graphics Processing Units have become increasingly important for high-performance computing. In particular, a number of industrial solutions and academic projects are proposing design frameworks based on FPGA-implemented GPU-like compute units. Existing GPU-like core projects provide limited hardware support for shared scratch-pad memory and particularly for the problem of bank conflicts, a major source of performance loss with many parallel kernels. In this paper, we present a configurable, GPU-like oriented scratchpad memory with built-in support for bank remapping. The core is fully synthetizable on FPGA with a contained hardware cost. We also validated the presented architecture with a cycle-accurate event-driven emulator written in C++ as well as an RTL simulator tool. Last, we demonstrated the impact of bank remapping and other parameters available with the proposed configurable shared scratchpad memory by evaluating the performance of two real-world parallelized kernels

Islam and Globalisation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

This volume contains the Proceedings of the 25th Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants (Naples, September 8-12, 2010) on Islam and Globalisation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Besides a general view on globalisation (Agostino Cilardo) and the history of the Union on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary (Urbain Vermeulen), the contributions concern History (Axel Havemann, Pasquale Macaluso, Antonino Pellitteri, Maria Giovanna Stasolla, Maria Vidyasova), Islam (Roswitha Badry, Marek M. Dziekan, Dmitry Frolov, Chistopher Melchert, Katarzyna Pachniak, Orsolya Varsanyi), Islamic Law (María Arcas Campoy, Reiner Brunner, Ana María Carballeira Debasa & Camilo Álvarez De Morales, Agostino Cilardo, Vasco Fronzoni, Wilferd Madelung), Literature & Linguistics (Abdessamad Belhaj, Julia Bray, Hélène Condylis, Francesca Maria Corrao, Adelya Gaynutdinova, Ali Kadem Kalati, Vladimir Lebedev, Ewa Machut-Mendecka, Mariangela Masullo, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, Christina Ossipova, Arie Schippers, Krystyna Skarzynska-Bochenska, Ludmila Torlakova, Urbain Vermeulen, Monika Winet), Travel (Oriana Capezio, Roberta Denaro, Maria Grazia Sciortino, Richard Van Leeuwen), Philosophy & Science (Carmela Baffioni, Daniel De Smet, Montse Díaz-Fajardo, Paulina B. Lewicka, Miklós Maróth, Juan Martos Quesada & María del Carmen Escribano Ródenas, Antonella Straface, Johannes Thomann), Art (Vincenza Grassi, Eva-Maria von Kemnitz)