A Fault Tolerant Parallelism Approach for Implementing High-Throughput Pipelined Advanced Encryption Standard

Abstract

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the most popular symmetric encryption method, which encrypts streams of data by using symmetric keys. The current preferable AES architectures employ effective methods to achieve two important goals: protection against power analysis attacks and high-throughput. Based on a different architectural point of view, we implement a particular parallel architecture for the latter goal, which is capable of implementing a more efficient pipelining in field-programmable gate array (FPGA). In this regard, all intermediate registers which have a role for unrolling the main loop will be removed. Also, instead of unrolling the main loop of AES algorithm, we implement pipelining structure by replicating nonpipelined AES architectures and using an auto-assigner mechanism for each AES block. By implementing the new pipelined architecture, we achieve two valuable advantages: (a) solving single point of failure problem when one of the replicated parts is faulty and (b) deploying the proposed design as a fault tolerant AES architecture. In addition, we put emphasis on area optimization for all four AES main functions to reduce the overhead associated with AES block replication. The simulation results show that the maximum frequency of our proposed AES architecture is 675.62[Formula: see text]MHz, and for AES128 the throughput is 86.5[Formula: see text]Gbps which is 30.9% better than its closest existing competitor.