Bridging the gap between symbolic and efficient AES implementations

  • Authors:
  • Andrew Moss;Dan Page

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom;University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Partial evaluation and program manipulation
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric block cipher used to encrypt data within many applications. As a result of its standardisation, and subsequent widespread use, a vast range of published techniques exist for efficient software implementations on diverse platforms. The most efficient of these implementations are written using very low-level approaches; platform dependent assembly language is used to schedule instructions, and most of the cipher is pre-computed into constant look-up tables. The need to resort to such a low-level approach can be interpreted as a failure to provide suitable high-level languages to the cryptographic community. This paper investigates the language features necessary to express AES more naturally (i.e., in a form closer to the original specification) as a source program, and the transformations necessary to produce efficient target programs in an automatic and portable manner.