Self-Reconfigurable Pervasive Platform for Cryptographic Application

The complexity exhibited by pervasive systems is constantly increasing. Customer electronics devices provide day to day a larger amount of functionalities. A common approach for guaranteeing high performance is to include specialized coprocessor units. However, these systems lack flexibility, since one must define, in advance, the coprocessor functionality. A solution to this problem is to use run-time reconfigurable coprocessors, exploiting the advantages of hardware while keeping a flexible platform. In this paper, we describe a self-reconfigurable pervasive platform containing a dynamically reconfigurable cryptographic coprocessor. As case-study, we consider three ciphering algorithms and we compare the performance of the coprocessor against a full-software implementation. The number of ciphering algorithms can be infinitely extended using a remote server

1. INTRODUCTION

Customer electronics devices provide day to day a larger amount of functionalities. At the same time, these functionalities demand more complex support. Guaranteeing high performance for these applications is not possible when the processing is fully performed by software. A common approach for improving performance is to include specialized coprocessors. However, given their static architecture these systems lack flexibility; and having specialized coprocessors for each task is not feasible, given the amount of logic required and the possible incompatibility of upgraded versions of the algorithms.