No abstract

At present, there are several pieces of research on designing and implementing new cryptographic algorithms that are lightweight and resistant to several, if not major forms of security attacks. However, some algorithms such as the International Data Encryption Algorithm (IDEA), which has been around for some time is yet to record any real threat against its functionality. To ensure its continued usage, current implementations rely on multiphase encryption where it is combined with other algorithms such as ROTation (ROT) and Data Encryption Standard (DES) for maximum security strength. Multiphase encryption implies that there is a tendency for an increase in hardware area and a reduction in overall speed. In such cases, having fast and reduced area algorithms are much desired. This paper, therefore, proposes an efficient hardware implementation of the IDEA cipher that is based on arithmetic modulo multiplication—one of the main computations of the IDEA—on a novel Vedic multiplier architecture. The increase in efficiency of the IDEA crypto architecture and the reduction in resources utilization is achieved through an enhancement of its structural architecture to utilize a fixed set of resources for all eight identical rounds of computation and the use of a proposed fast and lightweight Vedic hardware multiplier. The proposed hardware modification and resulting architecture are designed using the Xilinx ISE and Vivado tools. The architecture is synthesized using Precision Synthesis Tool (PS) and simulated using Modelsim SE 10.6d and ISIM simulation tools. The proposed IDEA cipher is 100% more efficient when designed based on the Vedic multiplier compared to existing designs. The hardware architecture is implemented on Spartan-6-FGG484 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) using Verilog HDL. Verified results show that the proposed Vedic-based IDEA occupied 212 Slices with the Vedic multiplier only occupying 28 Slices out of the total 212. The proposed architecture operates at a maximum frequency of 253.3 MHz.

The LEA block encryption algorithm is an architecture suitable for IoT systems with limited resources and space. It was developed by the National Security Technology Research Institute in 2013 and established as an international standard for cryptography by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 2019, drawing much attention from developers. In this paper, the 128-bit LEA block encryption algorithm was light weighted and implemented in a hardware environment. All modules share and reuse registers and are designed and implemented in a bottom area through the resource sharing function. As a result of synthesis using Xilinx ISE 14.7 Virtex-5 as a design environment, the maximum frequency achieved 190.88 MHz and has a processing speed of up to 128 Mbps. Compared to the previously designed architecture, we present a bottom-level hardware design with a 128-bit LEA algorithm implemented with a 49.8% reduction in Flip-Flop, 18.8% reduction in LUTs, and 67.6% reduction in Slices.

A secure and effective on-chip bus for detecting and preventing malicious attacks by infected IPs is presented in this paper. Most system inter-connects (on-chip bus) are vulnerable to hardware Trojan (Malware) attack because all data and control signals are routed. A proposed secure bus with modifications in arbitration, address decoding, and wrapping for bus master and slaves is designed using the Advanced High-Performance and Advance Peripheral Bus (AHB and APB Bus). It is implemented with the concept that arbiter checks share of masters and manage infected masters and slaves in every transaction. The proposed hardware is designed with the Xilinx 14.7 ISE and verified using the HBE-SoC-IPD test board equipped with Virtex4 XC4VLX80 FPGA device. The design has a total gate count of 39K at an operating frequency of 313MHz using the 0.13μm TSMC process.

Although the RISC-V ISA has not been around for long, it is a processor architecture that has been highlighted by many businesses and individuals for its low-cost and rapid pace of development. They are open-source-synthesizable hardware processors with minimal functionality that is ideal for current IoT applications involving simple sensors and actuator controls. Due to some qualities of hardware, they can operate in areas where software programs and applications cannot be used whereas, these software programs that run on such hardware equally help in understanding how hardware operates. This paper, therefore, proposes and discusses the design, implementation, and internal verification and test platform for a Reduced Instruction Set Code-V’s (RISC-V) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), using an interactive desktop program for a 32-bit single-cycle processor. This paper developed a system that functions as interactive assistance to RISC-V's ISA design and debugger using a more user-friendly desktop UI application. The uniqueness of this design is the flexibility of testing and debugging that is possible through either the software interface or through hardware peripherals such as Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) protocols in FPGA or even both. These peripherals allow users to view the contents of the register files and RAM being utilized by the implemented processor on the FPGA. The proposed desktop User Interface program monitors and controls the sequential processing and states of a 32-bit single-cycle RISC-V processor’s operation on an FPGA. Contents of the proposed processor’s registers and memory are displayed alongside other temporal or internal data. Internal components such as Program Counters (PC), Random Access Memory (RAM), are displayed all through the proposed User Interface (UI) program and also through various peripherals on the FPGA board. The software program is implemented using C# programing language through Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The proposed hardware synthesizable processor core is implemented using Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL) and synthesized with Xilinx Integrated Synthesis Environment (ISE) version 14.7. The proposed processor and its corresponding hardware test modules occupy 6476 Look-Up-Tables (LUT) and operate at a maximum frequency of 49MHz and its operation is verified on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The proposed processor and its test platform can serve as a good educational tool as well as a help for processor design engineers both experienced and beginners.