Hardware Accelerator Generation Framework for Cryptographic Primitives

Cryptographic primitives, consisting of repetitive operations with different inputs, are typically implemented using straight-line C code due to traditional execution on CPUs. Computing these primitives is necessary for secure communication; thus, dedicated hardware accelerators are required in resource and latency-constrained environments. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) generates hardware from high-level implementations in languages like C, enabling the rapid prototyping and evaluation of designs, leading to its prominent use in developing dedicated hardware accelerators. However, directly synthesizing the straight-line C implementations of cryptographic primitives can lead to large hardware designs with excessive resource usage or suboptimal performance. This thesis introduces a tool Cryptonite that automatically generates efficient, synthesizable, and correct-by-design hardware accelerators for cryptographic primitives directly from straight-line C code. Cryptonite first identifies high-level hardware constructs through verified rewriting, emphasizing resource reuse. The second stage automatically explores latency-oriented implementations of the compact design. This enables the flexible scaling of a particular accelerator to meet the hardware requirements. This thesis demonstrates Cryptonite's effectiveness using implementations from the Fiat Cryptography project, a library of verified and auto-generated cryptographic primitives for elliptic-curve cryptography.

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Georgia Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Sharma M, Karthikeya

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hao, Cong (Callie)

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Zhang, Qirun
• Krishna, Tushar

• High-level synthesis
• Cryptography
• Hardware acceleration
• Cryptonite
• Fiat Cryptography Project

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1853/77933

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.gatech.edu:1853/77933