Hardware Implementation of Authenticated Ciphers for Embedded Systems

The demand for embedded systems in applications that handle critical or private information has strongly focused designers' attention on the security aspects of this kind of system. Using the C programs and HDL descriptions available in the repositories of the CAESAR Competition and the ATHENa Project, this work presents a design flow that eases the development and evaluation of different solutions for the hardware implementation of authenticated ciphers and their incorporation as accelerating peripherals in embedded systems for different application cases. Three ciphers, finalists in the different categories established in the contest, have been analyzed, although the described approaches can be applied to any of the proposals submitted to the CAESAR Competition. A Zybo-Z7 development board that incorporates a Zynq-7000 device from Xilinx, which combines programmable logic from the FPGAs of the 7-Series with a dual-core Cortex-A9 ARM processing system, has been used as hardware platform in all the designs. The Vivado environment has been employed to perform the different stages of synthesis and verification necessary to carry out the implementation of the cipher, its conversion into an IP module, and its integration in an embedded system using different interconnection schemes that allow establishing cost/performance tradeoffs for different applications.