Efficient Password Hash Computation on an Open-Source Heterogeneous Research Platform with RISC-V Cores and Custom Accelerators

In this work, we describe our implementation of the specialized (custom) Bcrypt password hashing accelerator targeted to the HERO, an open-source heterogeneous computing platform. It combines a general-purpose RISC-V or ARM host processor with custom (specialized) or programmable accelerator cores, providing a heterogeneous, low-power, high-performance embedded platform for energy-efficient, high-throughput computing. We exploited platform characteristics to implement and evaluate the Bcrypt password hash computation, focusing on scalability, computational and energy efficiency in terms of computed hashes per second. We integrated our custom hardware accelerator for Bcrypt within HERO’s accelerator section. The accelerator is designed to optimize the most computationally intensive part of Bcrypt algorithm. It features multiple bcrypt computation units managed by an arbiter module and leveraging BRAMs for local storage. Our findings highlight the impact and benefits of hardware acceleration on cryptographic workloads, also we discuss integration challenges and optimizations required to achieve efficient execution within a representative heterogeneous computing platform such as HERO.