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Atomic-AES: A Compact Implementation of the AES Encryption/Decryption Core

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Progress in Cryptology – INDOCRYPT 2016 (INDOCRYPT 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10095))

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Abstract

The implementation of the AES encryption core by Moradi et al. at Eurocrypt 2011 is one of the smallest in terms of gate area. The circuit takes around 2400 gates and operates on an 8 bit datapath. However this is an encryption only core and unable to cater to block cipher modes like CBC and ELmD that require access to both the AES encryption and decryption modules. In this paper we look to investigate whether the basic circuit of Moradi et al. can be tweaked to provide dual functionality of encryption and decryption (ENC/DEC) while keeping the hardware overhead as low as possible. As a result, we report an 8-bit serialized AES circuit that provides the functionality of both encryption and decryption and occupies around 2645 GE with a latency of 226 cycles. This is a substantial improvement over the next smallest AES ENC/DEC circuit (Grain of Sand) by Feldhofer et al. which takes around 3400 gates but has a latency of over 1000 cycles for both the encryption and decryption cycles.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Another important point to note is that this particular architecture interprets the AES input vectors in a row major fashion i.e. the first four bytes are placed in the first row, the second four bytes in the second row so on. Most AES implementations use a column major ordering.

  2. 2.

    One way to achieve this is to use a gated clock which does not present a leading edge during the shiftrow period.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who helped improve the quality and presentation of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Temasek Labs, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Subhadeep Banik

  2. DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark

    Andrey Bogdanov

  3. ALARI, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland

    Francesco Regazzoni

Authors
  1. Subhadeep Banik
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  2. Andrey Bogdanov
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  3. Francesco Regazzoni
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Subhadeep Banik .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Haifa , Haifa, Israel

    Orr Dunkelman

  2. Indraprashtha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-D), New Delhi, India

    Somitra Kumar Sanadhya

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Banik, S., Bogdanov, A., Regazzoni, F. (2016). Atomic-AES: A Compact Implementation of the AES Encryption/Decryption Core. In: Dunkelman, O., Sanadhya, S. (eds) Progress in Cryptology – INDOCRYPT 2016. INDOCRYPT 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10095. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49890-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49890-4_10

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