UniCrypt: Universal Crypto Engine with Optimized Resource Sharing for Security Applications

Nowadays, traditional hash functions and stream ciphers, including SHA256, SM3, BLAKE256, BLAKE2s, ChaCha20, and Salsa20, are widely used for data security and protection. Unfortunately, most existing cryptographic platforms supporting these algorithms suffer from limitations in performance, flexibility, and hardware efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Universal Efficient Crypto Engine (UniCrypt), a highly flexible architecture that efficiently supports six traditional cryptographic algorithms with low power consumption, minimal resource usage, and high performance. Specifically, UniCrypt incorporates three key innovations: a dynamically configurable memory organization, a unified configurable ALU, and system pipeline scheduling. The UniCrypt architecture has been implemented and verified at the system-onchip level on the Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA. Real-time comparisons with powerful CPUs demonstrate that UniCrypt achieves 1.2 times to 9.3 times higher energy efficiency. Moreover, FPGA synthesis results further show that UniCrypt delivers throughput improvements ranging from 1.35 times to 92.3 times and area efficiency improvements from 1.14 times to 280.5 times compared to related FPGA-based accelerators. Finally, ASIC synthesis results demonstrate that UniCrypt achieves a 78.7% unified efficiency while attaining a computational throughput improvement of 3.34 times to 54.44 times compared to related works.