RHCP: A Reconfigurable High-efficient Cryptographic Processor for Decentralized IoT Platforms

In decentralized IoT platforms, high flexibility, per-formance, and hardware efficiency are the requirements for cryptographic hardware for maintaining data security. This paper proposes a reconfigurable high-efficient cryptographic processor (RHCP), incorporating cutting-edge optimization techniques, cryptographic arithmetic logic unit (C-ALU), RHCP host management, and two-level pipeline scheduling to reach outstanding throughput and energy efficiency. Evaluation results on the Xilinx FPGA ALVEO U280 System on Chip exhibit a maximum frequency of 251.06 MHz, throughput of 4.02 Gbps, and power consumption of 14.98 W. Moreover, the ex-perimental outcomes conducted on the 45nm ASIC technology demonstrate the remarkable flexibility of RHCP when evaluating the throughput and energy efficiency of various cryptographic algorithms, such as BLAKE-256, BLAKE2s, MD5, RIPEMD-160, Salsa20/12, SHA-256, and Chacha20. Additionally, the results obtained from the ASIC analysis results highlight the superior performance of RHCP compared to existing approaches. Notably, RHCP showcases significant enhancements, with throughput improvements ranging from 2.54 to 10.68 times, energy efficiency enhancements ranging from 1.71 to 8.46 times, and energy-delay product improvements ranging from 1.81 to 21.5 times.