Hardware/Software Morphing for Cryptography

Nowadays, hardware modules are dimensioned with respect to their peak performance requirements. If the requirements vary at runtime, hardware modules may be oversized for a particular load scenario. With the introduction of reconfigurable hardware, systems may self-adapt to different load scenarios by swapping modules at runtime; and for low load scenarios, a task may alternatively being executed in software on a CPU.

In this master thesis, a system will be developed where the encryption/decryption modules of a secured communication channel will self-adapt according to the present throughput on the channel.