BCIM: A Bit-Serial Approach for Block-Cipher-in-Memory

This abstract presents Block-Cipher-In-Memory (BCIM), a constant-time, high-throughput, bit-serial in-memory cryptography scheme to support versatile block ciphers. Exploiting the nature of constant-time bit-serial execution and column-wise single instruction multiple data (SIMD) processing, BCIM achieves inherent resiliency to timing-based side-channel attacks and high-throughput encryption/decryption. Architectural and circuit level innovations ensure minimal memory footprint for storing repetitive keys, and ultimately improve the peak operating frequency and energy efficiency. Experimental results suggest that BCIM shows substantial performance and energy improvements over state-of-the-art bit-parallel IMC ciphers, as well as competitive performance and orders of magnitude energy advantages over the bitsliced software implementations on both CPU/MCU platforms.