Accelerating the AES encryption function in OpenSSL for embedded systems

The Internet is an insecure medium. In embedded systems however, network security comes at a very high cost. While there are freely available solutions such as the OpenSSL library, the performance of most embedded processors, on their own, are just not adequate enough to perform cryptography for realtime applications. In this paper, we focus on the implementation of a cryptographic embedded system deploying an Altera Nios II embedded processor working with an AES encryption hardware accelerator. The RTOS applied is uClinux, on which the OpenSSL library has been ported and cross compiled. Experimental results show that hardware acceleration can improve the performance of OpenSSL cryptographic functions, and hence, of the SSL connection as well.