An ASIC Implementation of the AES SBoxes

  • Authors:
  • Johannes Wolkerstorfer;Elisabeth Oswald;Mario Lamberger

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • CT-RSA '02 Proceedings of the The Cryptographer's Track at the RSA Conference on Topics in Cryptology
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This article presents a hardware implementation of the S-Boxes from the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The SBoxes substitute an 8-bit input for an 8-bit output and are based on arithmetic operations in the finite field GF(28). We show that a calculation of this function and its inverse can be done efficiently with combinational logic. This approach has advantages over a straight-forward implementation using read-only memories for table lookups. Most of the functionality is used for both encryption and decryption. The resulting circuit offers low transistor count, has low die-size, is convenient for pipelining, and can be realized easily within a semi-custom design methodology like a standard-cell design. Our standard cell implementation on a 0.6 碌m CMOS process requires an area of only 0.108 mm2 and has delay below 15 ns which equals a maximum clock frequency of 70 MHz. These results were achieved without applying any speed optimization techniques like pipelining.