CERMET: Coding for Energy Reduction with Multiple Encryption Techniques -- It's easy being green

This paper presents CERMET, an energy-efficient hardware architecture designed for hardware-constrained cryptosystems. CERMET employs a base cryptosystem in conjunction with network coding to provide both information-theoretic and computational security while reducing energy consumption per bit. This paper introduces the hardware architecture for the system and explores various optimizations to enhance its performance. The universality of the approach is demonstrated by designing the architecture to accommodate both asymmetric and symmetric cryptosystems. The analysis reveals that the benefits of this proposed approach are multifold, reducing energy per bit and area without compromising security or throughput. The optimized hardware architectures can achieve below 1 pJ/bit operations for AES-256. Furthermore, for a public key cryptosystem based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), a remarkable 14.6X reduction in energy per bit and a 9.3X reduction in area are observed, bringing it to less than 1 nJ/bit.