General-purpose FPGA platform for efficient encryption and hashing

Many applications require protection of secret or sensitive information, from sensor nodes and embedded applications to large distributed systems. The confidentiality of data can be protected by encryption using symmetric-key ciphers, and the integrity of the data can be ensured by using a cryptographic hash function to calculate a "digital fingerprint." In this paper, we propose reconfigurable FPGA hardware components that enable rapid deployment of cryptographic and other algorithms. The novelty of our hardware components is in their general-purpose design which enables easy mappings of algorithms to allow customizations of data protection for different usage scenarios. Since we utilize only a small part of an FPGA chip, our design can be readily integrated with other processing needs of a mobile device, a sensor node or a System-on-Chip. Important block ciphers like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as well as advanced cryptographic hash algorithms like Whirlpool map well onto our general-purpose components. Our solution facilitates easy hardware implementation of customizable encryption and hashing solutions, with area and speed performance comparable to custom FPGA implementations targeted at a specific cipher or hash algorithm. We achieve the best efficiency in Mbps/slice for Whirlpool. Furthermore, the components that we have proposed can be used for many other applications - not just for implementing block ciphers and cryptographic hash functions.