Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Implementation in FPGA

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a widely used symmetric encryption algorithm that ensures secure data communication. This project focuses on implementing AES on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to achieve high-speed, efficient, and real-time encryption. The primary objective is to leverage the parallel processing capabilities of FPGA to enhance encryption performance while maintaining security and reliability. Initially, MATLAB is utilized for modeling and simulating AES, ensuring accuracy and optimizing performance before hardware implementation. The FPGA-based design incorporates pipelining and parallelism to improve throughput and reduce latency, making it suitable for applications requiring secure and high-speed data transmission. Additionally, the implementation supports key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 bits, adhering to AES standards while optimizing hardware utilization. Compared to traditional software-based AES implementations, FPGA-based encryption offers significant advantages in terms of speed, power efficiency, and security against side-channel attacks. The project results are validated using standard AES test vectors, and optimizations are applied to enhance efficiency. This research contributes to secure digital infrastructure by providing a robust hardware-based encryption solution applicable to domains such as telecommunications, cloud security, and embedded systems.