Efficient substructure sharing methods for optimising the inner-product operations in Rijndael advanced encryption standard

[[abstract]]The Rijndael advanced encryption standard (AES) contains two paired important transformations, MixColumns (inverse MixColumns) and SubByte (inverse SubBytes), the most crucial operations in the AES encryption /decryption processes. They consist of XOR-based inner production operations in GF(28). In the paper, two substructure sharing methods are proposed to reduce the area cost of implementing these transformations. The first method exploits pure bit-level sharing with two optimisation stages, while the second method combines both the byte-level and bit-level techniques to further improve the area /speed performance. Comparisons in both the architectural-level designs and the technology-dependent cell-based implementations are given. An AES processor with iterative architecture is implemented using both a 0.18 μm UMC cell library and a Xilinx FPGA device. Experimental results show that the whole AES processor based on our proposed method can reduce area cost significantly compared with Synopsys area-optimised synthesis results or other previous implementations