A Heterogeneous RISC-V SoC for Confidential Computing and Password Recovery

Abstract

In today’s silicon design, there are far more processors than the main ones. Domain-specific accelerators and coprocessors are widely used to continuing to increase the performance and energy efficiency of computing systems. Focused on the security domain, this paper presents a heterogeneous ASIC SoC built with the most popular open-source RISC-V ISA, a coprocessor providing the trusted execution environment for confidential computing and an energy efficient rule-based password generation accelerator. Thanks to its continuously completing ecosystem, the RISC-V core provides application interfaces and task management for the whole SoC, through which we validated the security mechanism for confidential computing in the coprocessor and tested the performance of the password generation accelerator. In addition to verifying the functionality of our design in GlobalFoundries 22FDX technology, the evaluation results also show that our password recovery system is able to process about 0.97 passwords per cycle at 500 MHz and is $25.4 \times$ more energy efficient than that of FPGA implementation.