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Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been widely used for the digital signature to ensure the security in communication. It is important for the ECC processor to support a variety of ECC standards to be compatible with different security applications. Thus, a flexible processor which can support different standards and algorithms is desired. In this paper, an efficient and flexible dual-field ECC processor using the hardware–software approach is presented. The proposed processor can support arbitrary elliptic curve. An elaborate modular arithmetic logic unit is designed. It can perform basic modular arithmetic operations and achieve high efficiency. Based on our designed instruction set, the processor can be programmed to perform various point operations based on different algorithms. To demonstrate the flexibility of our processor, a point multiplication algorithm with power analysis resistance is adopted. Our design is implemented in the field-programmable gate array platform and also in the application-specified integrated circuit. After implemented in the 55 nm CMOS process, the processor takes between 0.60 ms (163 bits ECC) and 6.75 ms (571 bits ECC) to finish one-point multiplication. Compared to other related works, the merits of our ECC processor are the high hardware efficiency and flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the major solution for constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of a mobile robot's location. Correlative Scan Matching (CSM) is a scan matching algorithm for obtaining the posterior distribution probability for the robot's pose in SLAM. This paper combines the non-linear optimization algorithm and CSM algorithm into an NLO-CSM (Non-linear Optimization CSM) algorithm for reducing the computation resources and the amount of computation while ensuring high calculation accuracy, and it presents an efficient hardware accelerator design of the NLO-CSM algorithm for the scan matching in 2D LiDAR SLAM. The proposed NLO-CSM hardware accelerator utilizes pipeline processing and module reusing techniques to achieve low hardware overhead, fast matching, and high energy efficiency. FPGA implementation results show that, at 100 MHz clock, the power consumption of the proposed hardware accelerator is as low as 0.79 W, while it performs a scan match at 8.98 ms and 7.15 mJ per frame. The proposed design outperforms the ARM-A9 dual-core CPU implementation with a 92.74% increase and 90.71% saving in computing speed and energy consumption, respectively. It has also achieved 80.3% LUTs, 84.13% FFs, and 20.83% DSPs saving, as well as an 8.17× increase in frame rate and 96.22% improvement in energy efficiency over a state-of-the-art hardware accelerator design in the literature. ASIC implementation in 65 nm can further reduce the computing time and energy consumption per scan to 5.94 ms and 0.06 mJ, respectively, which shows that the proposed NLO-CSM hardware accelerator design is suitable for resource-limited and energy-constrained mobile and micro robot applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Embedded systems are vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks. In this paper, we propose a hardware memory monitor module that aims to detect buffer overflow attacks by analyzing the security of an embedded processor at the instruction level. The functionality of the memory monitor module does not rely on the source code and can perform security check through dynamic methods. Compared with several existing countermeasures that protect only part of the program’s data space, our proposed memory monitor module can protect the program’s entire data space. The proposed memory monitor module has negligible performance overhead because it runs in parallel with the embedded processor. As demonstrated in an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based prototype, the experimental results show that our memory monitor module can effectively resist several types of buffer overflow attacks with approximately a 15% hardware cost overhead and only a 0.1% performance penalty. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]