Biblio

Diffie-Hellman and RSA encryption/decryption involve computationally intensive cryptographic operations such as modular exponentiation. Computing modular exponentiation using appropriate pre-computed pairs of bases and exponents was first proposed by Boyko et al. In this paper, we present a reconfigurable architecture for pre-computation methods to compute modular exponentiation and thereby speeding up RSA and Diffie-Hellman like protocols. We choose Diffie-Hellman key pair (a, ga mod p) to illustrate the efficiency of Boyko et al's scheme in hardware architecture that stores pre-computed values ai and corresponding gai in individual block RAM. We use a Pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) to randomly choose ai values that are added and corresponding gai values are multiplied using modular multiplier to arrive at a new pair (a, ga mod p). Further, we present the advantage of using Montgomery and interleaved methods for batch multiplication to optimise time and area. We show that a 1024-bit modular exponentiation can be performed in less than 73$μ$s at a clock rate of 200MHz on a Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGA.

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) has gained its popularity in computing systems as a hardware security approach. TPM provides the boot time security by verifying the platform integrity including hardware and software. However, once the software is loaded, TPM can no longer protect the software execution. In this work, we propose a dynamic TPM design, which performs control flow checking to protect the program from runtime attacks. The control flow checker is integrated at the commit stage of the processor pipeline. The control flow of program is verified to defend the attacks such as stack smashing using buffer overflow and code reuse. We implement the proposed dynamic TPM design in FPGA to achieve high performance, low cost and flexibility for easy functionality upgrade based on FPGA. In our design, neither the source code nor the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) needs to be changed. The benchmark simulations demonstrate less than 1% of performance penalty on the processor, and an effective software protection from the attacks.