Design-space exploration of the most widely used cryptography algorithms

Summarization: Network data are, currently, often encrypted at a low level. In addition, as it is widely supported, the majority of future networks will use low-layer (IP level) encryption. Moreover, current trends imply that future networks are likely to be dominated by mobile terminals, thus, the power consumption and electromagnetic emissions aspects of encryption devices will be critical. This paper presents several realizations of the two most widely used encryption algorithms, DES and AES, both in software and in hardware. We present software implementations of the algorithms running on two of the state-of-the-art Intel IXP Network Processors and 11 hardware realizations based on a standard-cell library. In particular, five of our hardware realizations are conventional flip-flop based clocked designs, whereas the other six are either asynchronous, or latch-based synchronous designs. We demonstrate that the most efficient realization of the DES algorithm is one of the proposed asynchronous hardware implementations, whereas for the AES algorithm the latch-based design presented seems to be optimal. By placing and routing those designs, we have also realized that the commercial ASIC synthesis tools cannot accurately predict the area and the performance of the placed and routed final netlist in such designs, since the ASIC implementations of the encrypted algorithms include a very large number of wires and a limited number of logic CMOS cells.Presented on: Microprocessors and Microsystem