Low-Latency DAE: A Configurable Lightweight Hybrid Data and Address Encryption Engine for IoT Real-Time NVM Protection

In Internet of Things (IoT) real-time systems and edge computing applications, memory encryption engines (MEEs) are used for real-time memory encryption to protect program code and sensitive data in nonvolatile memories (NVMs) and mitigate some side-channel attacks. However, for resource-constrained devices, it is a considerable challenge to realize a lightweight solution with low-hardware overhead, high security, and flexible bit-width. This article presents a lightweight full-MEE, called data&address encryption (DAE), which employs hybrid data and address encryption to protect NVMs on-the-fly with low-logic latency, flexible width adaptation, and enhanced security in some aspects. The security analyses show that DAE performs effective mitigation in some side-channel attacks, such as Remanence attack, and provides better security than data-only ciphers in resisting the brute-force attack, etc. Evaluated with TSMC’s 40-nm standard CMOS technology, 128-bit DAE has a lightweight feature of 8.703 KGates, which is only 5.46% of 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES-128), and performs a $5.8\times $ throughput, a $105.9\times $ area efficiency, and a $48.1\times $ energy efficiency. In the experiments on SoC simulation and field programmable gate array platform with an embedded RISC-V core, the results show that DAE causes little or no loss of system frequency and throughput.