LOW-POWER SCALABLE ENCRYPTION FOR WIRELESS SYSTEMS

Secure transmission of multimedia information (e.g., voice, video, dat a etc.) is critical in many wireless network applications. Wireless tr ansmission imposes constraints not found in typical wired systems such as low power consumption, tolerance to high bit error rates, and scal ability. A variety of low power techniques have been developed to redu ce the power of several encryption algorithms. One key idea involves e xploiting the variation in computation requirements to dynamically var y the power supply voltage. Application of low power techniques to a w ireless camera application yield more than an order of magnitude reduc tion in power Consumption over conventional design methods. Test circu its for five algorithms have been fabricated in a 0.6 mu m process and the resulting power consumption of each is presented. In addition, a low power hybrid system that combines a power-efficient keystream gene rator with a secure pseudo-random seed generator is proposed that prov ides 1 Mbps data encryption at a total estimated power consumption of 150 mu W.