UCP: A Unified Cryptographic Processor for High Performance and Low Power Security Applications

Cryptography, including hash functions and stream ciphers, is crucial for data security across various systems that require flexible, high-performance, and low-power hardware architectures. Unfortunately, existing works are limited in achieving high efficiency and high flexibility. To address this gap, this paper proposes a Unified Cryptographic Processor (UCP) using Unified ALU, shared registers, and compact pipeline scheduling to ensure high flexibility, performance, and low power consumption and hardware resources. Comparisons with FPGA-based studies reveal that the UCP achieves 14.17 and 2.3 times better throughput and power efficiency, respectively. Further, ASIC experimental results demonstrate that the UCP has a unified trade-off from 7.9% to 17.2% reduced throughput compared to the basic single-function cores. Moreover, compared with previous studies that only support a single algorithm, the UCP shows better efficiency in resource utilization, power consumption, and improvements in throughput ranging from 1.49 to 21.2 times.