Design and Security-Mitigation of Custom and Configurable Hardware Cryptosystems

Cryptographic algorithms and associated hardware accelerators are ubiquitously used to preserve the confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of sensitive data on electronic devices used by consumers, governments, military forces, and spacecraft. The proliferation of cryptographic algorithms in modern devices has made it more difficult to orchestrate exhaustive attacks on sensitive data using classical cryptoanalysis. However, hardware implementations of such cryptosystems are often vulnerable to attacks such as timing and power side channels, fault injection, and reverse engineering. Furthermore, protecting assets and maintaining security requires different configurations and capabilities for different applications. In this paper, we outline conventional symmetric and asymmetric cryptocores along with cryptographic hash function. We also include existing security primitives to aid and ensure secure system operation. We discuss the mitigation of existing threats and vulnerabilities on each of these cryptographic and security primitive modules and provide design overheads and security assessments for each configuration to aid design space exploration.