Projects:2020s1-1210 Performance Evaluation of Cryptographic Functions

Introduction

With the advent of an increasingly online and interconnected world, the need for fast and efficient data encryption has never been higher. In pursuit of this, the Australian Semiconductor Technology Company (ASTC) has sponsored this project to examine three kinds of implementations of cryptographic operations in a RISC-V based embedded system. The objective is to compare and evaluate the performance of software based, hardware based, and hybrid implementations of AES utilizing a dedicated co-processor supplied by ASTC.

Project Team

Project Students

• Lewis Omond
• Kieran Hunt

Project Supervisors

• Braden Phillips (The University of Adelaide)
• Peter Ashenden (ASTC)

Background

Encryption is a security measure that underpins private communication of data between devices on the internet. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) defines the algorithm used to encrypt data before it is sent. As a company developing processors for use in Internet of Things devices, the Australian Semiconductor Technology Company (ASTC) is interested in the performance of their designs when used for encryption tasks. To this end, ASTC have requested an investigation into processor performance when conducting encryption operations with varying degrees of hardware acceleration.

Aims & Objectives

• Produce three different implementations of AES on ASTC’s RV32IC_P5 RISC_V processor with varying levels of hardware acceleration.
• Provide analysis regarding the relative performance of each implementation in terms of cost and performance.

Implementation Platforms

All implementations of AES were tested on the RV32IC_P5, running on an Arty A7 100T FPGA Development Board.

Software Implementation: The software implementation used the base RV32IC_P5 with no additional hardware acceleration.

Hybrid Implementation: For the hybrid implementation, ASTC added additional instructions to the base processor micro-architecture.

Hardware Implementation: The Hardware Implementation utilised an external accelerator module designed by ASTC to handle all encryption operations.