An Energy-Efficient Reconfigurable DTLS Cryptographic Engine for End-to-End Security in IoT Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reconfigurable cryptographic engine for IoT that significantly reduces energy consumption and code size, enabling secure end-to-end communication with high efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel reconfigurable DTLS engine with substantial improvements in energy efficiency and code size over software and existing hardware solutions.

Findings

10x reduction in code size

438x energy-efficiency improvement over software

ECC primitive 237x and 9x more energy-efficient than software and hardware

Abstract

This paper presents a reconfigurable cryptographic engine that implements the DTLS protocol to enable end-to-end security for IoT. This implementation of the DTLS engine demonstrates 10x reduction in code size and 438x improvement in energy-efficiency over software. Our ECC primitive is 237x and 9x more energy-efficient compared to software and state-of-the-art hardware respectively. Pairing the DTLS engine with an on-chip RISC-V allows us to demonstrate applications beyond DTLS with up to 2 orders of magnitude energy savings.