POCA: a PYNQ Offloaded Cryptographic Accelerator on Embedded FPGA-based Systems

The pervasiveness of embedded systems across edge and connected devices is challenging their design, as sharing data securely via AES encryption is computationally intensive. This work proposes POCA, an FPGA-accelerated HW/SW library that performs AES cryptographic primitives with different modes and the most used key sizes. The HW/SW approach of POCA showcases the benefits of accelerated cryptographic primitives and the flexibility of a unified platform interface across different embedded systems by exploiting the Python PYNQ framework. POCA matches the multicore ARM crypto extensions on an Ultrascale+ ZU3EG while overwhelming SW performance.