Fast and Energy-Efficient Block Ciphers Implementations in ARM Processors and Mali GPU

ABSTRACT

With the proliferation of the internet of things (IoT) and device-to-device (D2D) communications enabled by the boom of mobile computing technology, secure high-speed communication has now become indispensable in our daily life. This is especially true when potentially private data are being continually sensed by and communicated among mobile devices as they exist in a world of interconnected inanimate objects, which is also one of the main themes of the upcoming 5G revolution. As the amount of data to be secured for high-speed communications is vast, there is a need to ensure that the block ciphers used for encryption are deployed without incurring significant computational cost. In this paper, we present fast implementations of recent industry standard block ciphers in typical embedded platforms, consisting of multi-core CPU (ARM A15 and A7) and GPU (Mali T628). We implemented the conventional block cipher (AES) and lightweight block ciphers (CLEFIA, SIMON, SPECK and PRESENT) optimized for fast computation. We also analyze the energy efficiency of these block ciphers computation in CPU and GPU, as low power consumption is crucial for the embedded system. Our experimental results show that the embedded GPU is not only able to compute block ciphers faster than conventional CPU but also consumes significantly less power.

KEYWORDS:

• ARM
• Block cipher
• Energy efficiency
• GPU
• Network security

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman Research Fund: [Grant Number IPSR/RMC/UTARRF/2015-C1/L06].

Notes on contributors

W. K. Lee

Wai-Kong Lee was born in Malaysia in 1982. He received the BEng in electronics and MEngSc from Multimedia University in 2006 and 2009, respectively. He received PhD from University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) in 2018. He is now an assistant professor in University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Malaysia. His research interests include cryptographic engineering, high-performance computing and embedded system design.

Raphael C.-W. Phan

Raphael C W Phan received his BEng, MEngSc and PhD degrees from Multimedia University (MMU), Malaysia in 1999, 2001 and 2005, respectively. He is currently a professor in School of Information Technology, Monash University, Malaysia. He is the general chair of Mycrypt '05 and Asiacrypt '07, Mycrypt '16 and publicity co-chair for IEEE Symposium on Trust, Security & Privacy for Emerging Applications (TSP'10). He annually serves in various technical program committees of cryptology and security conferences. He researches on diverse aspects of security and privacy, including cryptology, protocol security, network security and system security. He is also one of the authors for BLAKE hash function. BLAKE was selected as one of the five finalists for SHA-3 competition by NIST. Email: [email protected]

B. M. Goi

Bok-Min Goi received his BEng degree from University of Malaya (UM) in 1998, and the MEngSc and PhD degrees from Multimedia University (MMU), Malaysia, in 2002 and 2006, respectively. He is now the dean and a professor in the Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Malaysia. He is the chairperson for Centre for Healthcare Science & Technology, UTAR. He was also the general chair for ProvSec 2010 and CANS 2010, programme chair for IEEE-STUDENT 2012, and the PC members for many crypto/security conferences. His research interests include cryptology, security protocols, information security, digital watermarking, computer networking and embedded systems design. Email: [email protected]