RGMU: A High-flexibility and Low-cost Reconfigurable Galois Field Multiplication Unit Design Approach for CGRCA

Abstract

Finite field multiplication is a non-linear transformation operator that appears in the majority of symmetric cryptographic algorithms. Numerous specified finite field multiplication units have been proposed as a fundamental module in the coarse-grained reconfigurable cipher logic array to support more cryptographic algorithms; however, it will introduce low flexibility and high overhead, resulting in reduced performance of the coarse-grained reconfigurable cipher logic array. In this article, a high-flexibility and low-cost reconfigurable Galois field multiplication unit (RGMU) is proposed to balance the tradeoffs between the function, delay, and area. All the finite field multiplication operations, including maximum distance separable matrix multiplication, parallel update of Fibonacci linear feedback shift register, parallel update of Galois linear feedback shift register, and composite field multiplication, are analyzed and two basic operation components are abstracted. Further, a reconfigurable finite field multiplication computational model is established to demonstrate the efficacy of reconfigurable units and guide the design of RGMU with high performance. Finally, the overall architecture of RGMU and two multiplication circuits are introduced. Experimental results show that the RGMU can not only reduce the hardware overhead and power consumption but also has the unique advantage of satisfying all the finite field multiplication operations in symmetric cryptography algorithms.