• cyber
• security
• hardware accelerator
• FPGA
• AES
• SHA
• ECC
• RNG

The research presented in this Thesis focuses on efficient implementation of cryptographic
hardware accelerators developed in the European Processor Initiative
(EPI) framework. EPI is a project under development with the aim of implementing
the first processor fully designed in Europe intended to be used in high performance
applications such as Big-Data analysis. To ensure an appropriate level of
security, the EPI processor embeds several dedicated sub-systems to manage the cybersecurity
aspects. Each of these sub-systems is based on a suite of cryptographic
hardware accelerators denoted Crypto-Tile.
The Crypto-Tile is composed by four different cryptographic co-processors, each of
them provides hardware acceleration for a specific algorithm or service: Advanced Encryption
Standard (AES) for symmetric key data encryption, Secure Hash Algorithm
(SHA) for message digest computation, hardware-based Random Number Generator
(RNG) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) support for asymmetric key data encryption
and digital signature. Furthermore, the Crypto-Tile provides advanced security
features such as internal storage of cipher keys, configurable policies for accesses
control and clock randomization to provide a preliminary countermeasure against timebased
and statistical attacks.
The research activity addresses the hardware optimization of the implemented cryptographic
accelerators. The work was mainly focused on the Crypto-Tile implementation
that respects the system requirements with the best trade-off between performance
and logic resources usage. In particular, an extensively design investigation has been
performed to reduce the system logic complexity exploiting shared logic inside the
cryptographic engines, as in the case of AES core that reuses the same combinational
logic to perform several block cipher modes. The Crypto-Tile has been synthesised using
a 7 nm standard-cell technology, providing a new characterization on this extremely
scaled technology of the implemented cryptographic accelerators respect to the
state-of-the-art.