Efficient and High-Performance Parallel Hardware Architectures for the AES-GCM

Since its acceptance as the adopted symmetric-key algorithm, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and its recently standardized authentication Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) have been utilized in various security-constrained applications. Many of the AES-GCM applications are power and resource constrained and require efficient hardware implementations. In this paper, different application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) architectures of building blocks of the AES-GCM algorithms are evaluated and optimized to identify the high-performance and low-power architectures for the AES-GCM. For the AES, we evaluate the performance of more than 40 S-boxes utilizing a fixed benchmark platform in 65-nm CMOS technology. To obtain the least complexity S-box, the formulations for the Galois Field (GF) subfield inversions in GF(2(4)) are optimized. By conducting exhaustive simulations for the input transitions, we analyze the average and peak power consumptions of the AES S-boxes considering the switching activities, gate-level netlists, and parasitic information. Additionally, we present high-speed, parallel hardware architectures for reaching low-latency and high-throughput structures of the GCM. Finally, by investigating the high-performance GF(2(128)) multiplier architectures, we benchmark the proposed AES-GCM architectures using quadratic and subquadratic hardware complexity GF(2(128)) multipliers. It is shown that the performance of the presented AES-GCM architectures outperforms the previously reported ones in the utilized 65-nm CMOS technology.