FPGA-Optimized Parallel SM4 Accelerator: A Reconfigurable Hardware-Software Co-design Framework
摘要
With the rapid advancement of information technologies and the increasing demand for secure and efficient data processing, symmetric encryption algorithms have become essential to ensuring digital communication security. SM4, a standardized 128-bit block cipher, is widely adopted in security-critical fields such as finance, embedded systems, and telecommunications. However, traditional software implementations often fail to meet the real-time performance and scalability demands of high-throughput environments. This paper proposes a high-performance SM4 encryption/decryption accelerator based on FPGA, utilizing a hardware-software co-design approach and fine-grained parallelism. The architecture integrates a modular SM4 core with a processor via an AXI+APB bus interface, enabling streamlined communication and flexible control. Key components include specialized submodules for key expansion and a 32-round iterative encryption submodules, optimized for low latency and efficient resource utilization. The system is implemented on a lightweight FPGA platform and validated through functional simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing. Experimental results show a per-round encryption latency of only 0.572 microseconds, significantly outperforming traditional software approaches. This design presents a scalable and energy-efficient solution suitable for secure, real-time applications in embedded environments.