LASE: Latency Aware Simple Encryption for Embedded Systems Security

Security in the area of embedded systems has been drawing enormous attention lately. Although recent advances in hardwarebased security models have shown promise for faster and more reliable security solutions, particular characteristics of embedded systems, such as computation and energy constraints, pose a unique challenge for the security researchers in this domain. Among hardware-based security models for traditional architectures, the Execute Only Memory (XOM) has used many different block ciphers to provide confidentiality as a part of the security module. However, implementations of many of these block ciphers in hardware do not meet the computation and energy constraints of embedded systems. In this paper, we propose to use a simple instruction encryption mechanism for embedded systems security based on the XOM model. As FPGAs provide reliable low-cost and high-performance implementations of cryptographic primitives, we implement our encryption algorithm on FPGA and compare with existing AES implementations for XOM-based models. The comparison has shown significant improvement on performance and power usage with a moderate level of security and hardware resources.