Design of Efficient AES Architecture for Secure ECG Signal Transmission for Low-power IoT Applications

Cryptography has an important role in securing information which has gained prominence due to the digitization. Exchange of sensitive personal data such as medical information tends to take place frequently throughout the globe; therefore, protecting data from unauthorized adversary access is imperative. Advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm is one of the algorithms which is broadly employed because of its exemplary security and usage in extensive applications. This research proposes a modified folded pipelined architecture of an AES algorithm for resources constraint applications. The folding transformation controls the circuit functionalities by time-multiplexing operations to a single functional unit and reduces its area considerably. The proposed architecture is implemented using fewer resources, hence, improves area and the power requirements as compared to the conventional algorithm. The work presented in this paper is applicable for encrypting and decrypting personalized Electrocardiograph (ECG) signals for secure transmission. The architecture proposed in this paper reduces the area requirements by 83% and power by 96.8% enabling its hardware implementation more efficient than the conventional AES. Due to its low power and area requirements, the architecture presented in this paper can be used for portable Internet of things (IoT) applications as well.