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This work presents a novel approach to a Hardware Root-of-Trust that leverages System-on-Chip technology for the implementation of hardware cryptographic functions. Taking advantage of the processing power of a System-on-Chip, the solution established promotes hardware-based security solutions over software-only solutions. The proposed Root-of-Trust, developed around a Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC device, integrates components based on cryptographic algorithms and physical phenomena. This innovative Root-of-Trust is tailored to support a spectrum of security tasks within cryptographic systems, including device-specific identifiers and keys, encryption and decryption, hashing, and signature generation and verification. The study adopts a unified design methodology, capitalizing on collaborative efforts to efficiently develop hardware primitives that significantly contribute to enhancing security in computing environments. Aligned with the advantages of reconfigurable hardware, this Hardware Root-of-Trust addresses the critical need for robust hardware-level security and introduces a set of countermeasures to fortify the design against potential threats.

This work presents the design and validation of a compact and efficient RO-PUF/TRNG module, which combines ID generation and entropy source functionalities, and can be used as an essential primitive of a hardware RoT for RISC-V based SoCs. The design was encapsulated as an IP core to provide it with a high level of configurability, flexibility, and reusability. A comprehensive SDK for online characterization, validation, and performance monitoring of PUF and TRNG quality metrics was also developed. The experimental results show that the proposed RO-PUF/TRNG IP is suitable for increasing the security of IoT applications.

The digital transformation is accelerating and requires the design of secure and privacy-enhancing technologies to guarantee trust on electronic devices that support it. In this context, it is designed a platform that integrates a hardware dedicated Root-of-Trust and a RISC-V processor core with the capability of offering a full suite of security services. The platform will be able to leverage this capability to support cryptographic protocols, privacy respectful attestation mechanisms, and enable trusted communication channels across 5G network infrastructures.

The proliferation of devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) and their implication in many activities of our lives have led to a considerable increase in concern about the security of these devices, posing a double challenge for designers and developers of products. On the one hand, the design of new security primitives, suitable for resource-limited devices, can facilitate the inclusion of mechanisms and protocols to ensure the integrity and privacy of the data exchanged over the Internet. On the other hand, the development of techniques and tools to evaluate the quality of the proposed solutions as a step prior to their deployment, as well as to monitor their behavior once in operation against possible changes in operating conditions arising naturally or as a consequence of a stress situation forced by an attacker. To address these challenges, this paper first describes the design of a security primitive that plays an important role as a component of a hardware-based root of trust, as it can act as a source of entropy for True Random Number Generation (TRNG) or as a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) to facilitate the generation of identifiers linked to the device on which it is implemented. The work also illustrates different software components that allow carrying out a self-assessment strategy to characterize and validate the performance of this primitive in its dual functionality, as well as to monitor possible changes in security levels that may occur during operation as a result of device aging and variations in power supply or operating temperature. The designed PUF/TRNG is provided as a configurable IP module, which takes advantage of the internal architecture of the Xilinx Series-7 and Zynq-7000 programmable devices and incorporates an AXI4-based standard interface to facilitate its interaction with soft- and hard-core processing systems. Several test systems that contain different instances of the IP have been implemented and subjected to an exhaustive

As quantum computing technology advances, the security of traditional cryptographic systems is becoming increasingly vulnerable. To address this issue, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) has emerged as a promising solution that can withstand the brute force of quantum computers. However, PQC is not immune to attacks that exploit weaknesses in implementation, such as Side Channel Attacks (SCAs). SCAs can extract secret keys by analyzing the physical characteristics such as power consumption of the device while performing cryptographic operation. Simple Power Analysis (SPA) is a type of SCA that uses power consumption measurements to extract sensitive information. By applying SPA to a specific hardware implementation of a PQC algorithm such as the NTRU, potential vulnerabilities can appear in the Arithmetic Unit (AU) in charge of the multiplication operation. The effectiveness of this analysis to extract sensitive information has been evaluated through extensive experiments in which different countermeasures and strategies have been proposed, as well as an accelerated algorithm has been implemented. The results demonstrate that SPA can point out security breaches in the NTRU implementation, indicating an issue that can affect the PQC in the future.

As quantum computing technology advances, the security of traditional cryptographic systems is becoming increasingly vulnerable. To address this issue, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) has emerged as a promising solution that can withstand the brute force of quantum computers. However, PQC is not immune to attacks that exploit weaknesses in implementation, such as Side Channel Attacks (SCAs). SCAs can extract secret keys by analyzing the physical characteristics such as power consumption of the device while performing cryptographic operation. Simple Power Analysis (SPA) is a type of SCA that uses power consumption measurements to extract sensitive information. By applying SPA to a specific hardware implementation of a PQC algorithm such as the NTRU, potential vulnerabilities can appear in the Arithmetic Unit (AU) in charge of the multiplication operation. The effectiveness of this analysis to extract sensitive information has been evaluated through extensive experiments in which different countermeasures and strategies have been proposed, as well as an accelerated algorithm has been implemented. The results demonstrate that SPA can point out security breaches in the NTRU implementation, indicating an issue that can affect the PQC in the future.

A digital signature is a cryptographic technique used to generate the signature of a message and verify the signature of that particular message. This signature scheme can ensure the validation of the authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation of a message. Nowadays, the public-key cryptosystem RSA is widely used to perform the digital signature by using a public/private key pair. This paper describes the software and hardware hybrid implementation of the RSA digital signature on a System-on-Chip (SoC) that uses a RISC-V processor as processing core. The key generation for the RSA has been done in software, and the most time-consuming mathematical operation behind the RSA algorithm, the modular exponentiation, has been implemented in hardware. The proposed approach has been validated using one Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA on the Genesys-2 FPGA board. The acceleration factor has also been calculated by comparing the software versus hardware implementation. The designed RSA IP has the flexibility to be reconfigured with different key sizes (512, 1024, 2048 bits) as per the requirements of the security level. The proposed implementation is verified using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) test vectors.

Hash functions are a crucial part of the cryptographic primitives. So much so that in 2007 a new competition was launched to select new standards for the SHA-3 function, which was won by Keccak. Since then, many software and hardware implementations have been submitted, claiming to reduce the number of operation cycles or increase design efficiency. Thus, this work aims to present a new hardware solution for the Keccak function, which forms the core of SHA-3, that achieves a high degree of tunability and is competitive with the state of the art. In addition, this work presents the integration of these designs into a hardware IP module together with the relevant drivers and functions that allow their use in software environments. Preliminary tests have shown an acceleration of up to 10 times compared to pure software code.

The advent of quantum computing with high processing capabilities will enable brute force attacks in short periods of time, threatening current secure communication channels. To mitigate this situation, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms have emerged. Among the algorithms evaluated by NIST in the third round of its PQC contest was the NTRU cryptosystem. The main drawback of this algorithm is the enormous amount of time required for the multiplication of polynomials in both the encryption and decryption processes. Therefore, the strategy of speeding up this algorithm using hardware/software co-design techniques where this operation is executed on specific hardware arises. Using these techniques, this work focuses on the acceleration of polynomial multiplication in the encryption process for resource-constrained devices. For this purpose, several hardware multiplications are analyzed following different strategies, taking into account the fact that there are no possible timing information leaks and that the available resources are optimized as much as possible. The designed multiplier is encapsulated as a fully reusable and parametrizable IP module with standard AXI4-Stream interconnection buses, which makes it easy to integrate into embedded systems implemented on programmable devices from different manufacturers. Depending on the resource constraints imposed, accelerations of up to 30–45 times with respect to the software-level multiplication runtime can be achieved using dedicated hardware, with a device occupancy of around 5%.

The proliferation of devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) and their implication in many activities of our lives have led to a considerable increase in concern about the security of these devices, posing a double challenge for designers and developers of products. On the one hand, the design of new security primitives, suitable for resource-limited devices, can facilitate the inclusion of mechanisms and protocols to ensure the integrity and privacy of the data exchanged over the Internet. On the other hand, the development of techniques and tools to evaluate the quality of the proposed solutions as a step prior to their deployment, as well as to monitor their behavior once in operation against possible changes in operating conditions arising naturally or as a consequence of a stress situation forced by an attacker. To address these challenges, this paper first describes the design of a security primitive that plays an important role as a component of a hardware-based root of trust, as it can act as a source of entropy for True Random Number Generation (TRNG) or as a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) to facilitate the generation of identifiers linked to the device on which it is implemented. The work also illustrates different software components that allow carrying out a self-assessment strategy to characterize and validate the performance of this primitive in its dual functionality, as well as to monitor possible changes in security levels that may occur during operation as a result of device aging and variations in power supply or operating temperature. The designed PUF/TRNG is provided as a configurable IP module, which takes advantage of the internal architecture of the Xilinx Series-7 and Zynq-7000 programmable devices and incorporates an AXI4-based standard interface to facilitate its interaction with soft- and hard-core processing systems. Several test systems that contain different instances of the IP have been implemented and subjected to an exhaustive