Lightweight Cryptography for Network-on-Chip Data Encryption

Abstract

System-on-chip (SoC) is the main processor for most recent applications such as the Internet of things (IoT). SoCs are composed of multiple blocks that communicate with each other through an integrated router. Data routing from a block to another poses many challenges. The network-on-chip (NoC) was used for the transmission of data from a source to a destination with high reliability, high speed, low power consumption, and low hardware occupation. An NoC is composed of a router, network links (NL), and network interface (NI). The main component of the NoC, the NI, is composed of an input/output FIFO, a finite state machine (FSM), pack, and depack modules. Data transmission from a block to another poses a security problem such as secret information extraction. In this paper, we proposed a data encryption framework for NoC based on a light encryption device (LED) algorithm. The main advantages of the proposed algorithm are to reduce the implementation area and to achieve high speed while reducing the power consumption. The proposed encryption framework was simulated Verilog/VHDL on the Xilinx ISE and implemented on the Xilinx Virtex 5 XC5VFX200T. The obtained results have shown that the proposed framework has a smaller area and higher speed compared to existing works. The proposed algorithm has reduced the NI implementation area and enhanced the network performance in terms of speed and security.