A Robust ASCON Cryptographic Coprocessor for Secure IoT Applications
George S. Athanasiou, Dimitris Boufeas, Evangelia Konstantopoulou · 2024
Internet-of-Things (IoT) is continuously expanding, and connected devices are increasing. This imposes security and privacy issues that pose great challenges and threats to property, economy, and health. Due to the limited resources of IoT devices hardware implementations of lightweight security mechanisms are of great value. In this paper, a robust, self-contained, coprocessor realizing ASCON lightweight cryptography is introduced. Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) 128 and 128a, Hash and Hasha, as well as Message Authentication Code (MAC) functionalities are included. The coprocessor communicates through AMBA (AHB and APB) interfaces and is implemented in both FPGA and ASIC technologies. Careful design choices were made, and implementation optimizations have been applied, leading to high performance with adequate area consumption. To the best of the authors' knowledge, it is the first time that a coprocessor including all ASCON main functionalities is proposed.