GMU Hardware API for Authenticated Ciphers

Abstract. In this paper, we propose a universal hardware Application Programming Interface (API) for authenticated ciphers. In particular, our API is intended to meet the requirements of all algorithms submit-ted to the CAESAR competition. Two major parts of the API, the inter-face and the communication protocol, were developed with the goal of reducing any potential biases in benchmarking of authenticated ciphers in hardware. Our high-speed implementation of the proposed hardware API includes universal, open-source pre-processing and post-processing units, common for all CAESAR candidates and the current standards, such as AES-GCM and AES-CCM. Apart from the full documentation, examples, and the source code of the pre-processing and post-processing units, we have made available in public domain a) a universal testbench to verify the functionality of any CAESAR candidate implemented us-ing our hardware API, b) a Python script used to automatically generate test vectors for this testbench, c) VHDL wrappers used to determine the maximum clock frequency and the resource utilization of all implemen-tations, and d) RTL VHDL source codes of high-speed implementations of AES and the Keccak Permutation F, which may be used as building blocks in implementations of related ciphers. We hope that the existence of these resources will substantially reduce the time necessary to develop hardware implementations of all CAESAR candidates for the purpose of evaluation, comparison, and future deployment in real products.