The digital bidirectional function as a hardware security primitive: Architecture and applications

Security and low power have emerged to become two essential requirements to modern design. In this paper, we have proposed a new hardware security primitive: digital bidirectional function (DBF) designed on FPGA to meet both criteria. The DBF has two forms of functions and implements two mappings of opposite directions. The DBF can be easily implemented using hierarchical lookup-table (LUT) structures with low delay and power overhead. In terms of applications, we demonstrate how DBF is applied in the protocol of secure message transfer and compare its power/bandwidth consumption with other cryptographic approaches. Our results indicate that the energy consumption of DBF outperforms the traditional ciphers by averagely two to three orders of magnitude.