# An Energy-Efficient Reconfigurable DTLS Cryptographic Engine for Securing Internet-of-Things Applications

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a hardware-implemented DTLS protocol with a reconfigurable ECC accelerator, achieving significant energy efficiency improvements for IoT security applications.

## Contribution

It presents the first hardware implementation of DTLS 1.3 with a reconfigurable ECC accelerator, greatly enhancing energy efficiency and resource usage for IoT security.

## Key findings

- 238x more energy-efficient than software ECC
- 438x energy efficiency improvement over software DTLS
- Low power consumption of 44.08 uJ per handshake

## Abstract

This paper presents the first hardware implementation of the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol to enable end-to-end security for the Internet of Things (IoT). A key component of this design is a reconfigurable prime field elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) accelerator, which is 238x and 9x more energy-efficient compared to software and state-of-the-art hardware respectively. Our full hardware implementation of the DTLS 1.3 protocol provides 438x improvement in energy-efficiency over software, along with code size and data memory usage as low as 8 KB and 3 KB respectively. The cryptographic accelerators are coupled with an on-chip low-power RISC-V processor to benchmark applications beyond DTLS with up to two orders of magnitude energy savings. The test chip, fabricated in 65 nm CMOS, demonstrates hardware-accelerated DTLS sessions while consuming 44.08 uJ per handshake, and 0.89 nJ per byte of encrypted data at 16 MHz and 0.8 V.