CompactRIO Based Real Time Implementation of AES Algorithm for Embedded Applications

For real-time embedded applications, several factors (time, cost, power) that are moving security considerations from a function-centric perspective into a system architecture (hardware/software) design issue. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) adopts Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as the most widely used encryption algorithm in many security applications. The AES algorithm specifies 10, 12 and 14 rounds offering different levels of security. Although the number of rounds determines the strength of security, the power consumption issue has risen recently, especially in real-time embedded systems. In this article, the authors present real time implementation of the AES encryption on the compactRIO platform for a different number of AES rounds. The target hardware is NI cRIO-9022 embedded real-time controller from National Instruments (NI). The real time encryption processing has been verified successfully. The power consumption and encryption time experimental results are presented graphically for 10, 12 and 14 rounds of processing.