A Design of a Fast Parallel-Pipelined Implementation of AES: Advanced Encryption Standard

Abstract

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm is a symmetric block cipher which operates on a sequence of blocks each consists of 128, 192 or 256 bits. Moreover, the cipher key for the AES algorithm is a sequence of 128, 192 or 256 bits. AES algorithm has many sources of parallelism. In this paper, a design of parallel AES on the multiprocessor platform is presented. While most of the previous designs either use pipelined parallelization or take advantage of the Mix_Column parallelization, our design is based on combining pipelining of rounds and parallelization of Mix_Column and Add_Round_Key transformations. This model is divided into two levels: the first is pipelining different rounds, while the second is through parallelization of both the Add_Round_Key and the Mix_Column transformations. Previous work proposed for pipelining AES algorithm was based on using nine stages, while, we propose the use of eleven stages in order to exploit the sources of parallelism in both initial and final round. This enhances the system performance compared to previous designs. Using two-levels of parallelization benefits from the highly independency of Add_Round_Key and Mix_Column/ Inv_Mix_Colum transformations. The analysis shows that the parallel implementation of the AES achieves a better performance. The analysis shows that using pipeline increases significantly the degree of improvement for both encryption and decryption by approximately 95%. Moreover, parallelizing Add_Round_Key and Mix_Column/ Inv_Mix_Column transformations increases the degree of improvement by approximately 98%. This leads to the conclusion that the proposed design is scalable and is suitable for real-time applications.