Securing an Efficient Lightweight AES Accelerator

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is generally regarded as one of the most popular cryptographic algorithms for ensuring data security. Typical lightweight implementations of the algorithm published in the literature focus on area and power optimization, while neglecting the performance. This paper presents a novel lightweight approach for the AES algorithm and considers both encryption and decryption. In terms of performance per unit area and performance per unit power, our 32-bit design outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.69x and 1.27x, respectively. These improvements become even larger when implementing higher data-path designs, such as 64-bit or 128-bit designs. To enhance its resilience against side-channel attacks, we modified our design by adopting and further improving on the most recent countermeasure, i.e., Domain-Oriented Masking (DOM). The results demonstrate that our five-stage and eight-stage 1
^st
-order DOM SBOX designs achieve a reduction in area of 9.9% and 6.9% compared to the original proposed design, respectively.