Design of Cryptographic Hardware Architecture for Mobile Computing

This paper presents compact cryptographic hardware architecture suitable for the Mobile Trusted Module (MTM) that requires low-area and low-power characteristics. The built-in cryptographic engine in the MTM is one of the most important circuit blocks and contributes to the performance of the whole platform because it is used as the key primitive supporting digital signature, platform integrity and command authentication. Unlike personal computers, mobile platforms have very stringent limitations with respect to available power, physical circuit area, and cost. Therefore special architecture and design methods for a compact cryptographic hardware module are required. The proposed cryptographic hardware has a chip area of 38K gates for RSA and 12.4K gates for unified SHA-1 and SHA-256 respectively on a 0.25um CMOS process. The current consumption of the proposed cryptographic hardware consumes at most 3.96mA for RSA and 2.16mA for SHA computations under the 25MHz.