Energy-Efficient Cryptographic Acceleration using Hardware-Software Co-Design with RISC-V

Abstract

Recent growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) has not only enabled novel applications but also led to new security concerns. Majority of IoT devices are resource-constrained em-bedded systems which make it prohibitively difficult to implement computationally complex cryptographic algorithms and security protocols in software. We demonstrate energy-efficient hardware accelerators for elliptic curve cryptography, lattice-based cryp-tography and pairing-based cryptography integrated with open-source RISC-V micro-processor to achieve up to two orders of magnitude improvement in energy-efficiency and performance through hardware-software co-design.