Enabling energy efficient image encryption using approximate memoization

Security has become one of the most important requirements for various devices for multi-sensor based embedded systems. The AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm is widely used for security, however, it requires high computing power. In order to reduce the CPU power for the data encryption of images, we propose a new image encryption module using hardware memoization, which can reuse previously generated data. However, as image pixel data are slightly different each other, the reuse rate of the simple memoization system is low. Therefore, we further apply an approximate concept to the memoization system to have a higher reuse rate by sacrificing quality. With the novel technique, the throughput can be highly improved by 23.98% with 14.88% energy savings with image quality loss minimization.