This article was originally published on June 4, 2019.
Editor’s Note: This content is contributed by Nathan Menhorn, Embedded Software Engineer in the Core Vertical Markets.
With security being a concern in most markets, why not take advantage of the built-in cryptographic hardware acceleration in the Zynq® UltraScale+™ MPSoCs and the Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoCs to accelerate all aspects of security?
Advantages over Software Only Solutions
Implementing cryptographic algorithms in software can be extremely slow, power hungry, and eat up large amounts of memory. Moving your cryptographic algorithms into hardware not only speeds up the algorithms and lets you deliver better-performing products but saves energy and allows developers to dedicate code space for other functionality.
Running wolfSSL, a Xilinx partner, on the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC using hardware cryptographic acceleration yields tremendous performance improvements as shown in this latest white paper. A summary of the largest improvements over software is shown below:
Algorithm | Performance Improvement (Percentage) |
AES-GCM 256-bit Encryption | 10800.39% |
AES-GCM 256-bit Decryption | 4720.07% |
SHA3/384 | 1037.98% |
RSA 2048 Public Encryption | 782.97% |
RSA 2048 Private Decryption | 594.77% |
RSA 4096 Public Encryption | 849.69% |
RSA 4096 Private Decryption | 545.95% |
Get up and Running Quickly
If you are new to cryptographic algorithms, Xilinx provides plenty of resources for developers to get the hardware cryptographic accelerators immediately up and running. The code provided on Xilinx’s github repository as well as the examples embedded in the Xilinx Software Development Kit (SDK) includes all the necessary drivers and examples of how to use the AES-GCM 256-bit engine, the SHA3 engine, and the RSA engine. Information regarding the use of the Arm® v8 cryptographic accelerators can be found from our partner wolfSSL as well as various resources including Arm.
To learn more on the specifics of Xilinx’s embedded cryptographic accelerators in the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoCs and Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoCs, please take 10 minutes to read the following white paper.
