PRO-GAGE: A High Performance Compact GAGE Hash Function Processor for Small Space Technology

There is a growing demand for small devices for aerospace and near-orbit applications such as CubeSats, airships, and others, which demand comprehensive functionality, computational capability and reliability. These small systems depend on limited power budgets, sufficient computational power, and accuracy. Secure and reliable operation of these devices is also a fundamental matter as the interest (from both private and public sectors) in exploring space is continuously increasing. At present, open space is considered an insecure environment and therefore increases the demand for constrained security primitives on these flying devices. However, many such features require significant power, which affects the battery lifetime. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the area, power and performance of a novel High Performance Compact low-power GAGE hash function processor called PRO-GAGE. The results show PRO-GAGE is 29x faster and 7x more power-efficient than the reported implementation of GAGE hash function on the AVR ATMEGA 328p micro-controller.