Authenticated Encryption for Low-Power Reconfigurable Wireless Devices

With the rapid growth of new wireless communication standards, a solution that is capable of providing a seamless shift between existing wireless protocols and high flexibility as well as capability is crucial. Technology based on reconfigurable devices offers this flexibility. In order to avail this enabling technology, these radios have to propose cryptographic services such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication. Therefore, integration of security services to these low-power devices is very challenging and crucial as they have limited resources and computational capabilities. In this paper, we present a crypto solution for reconfigurable devices. The solution is a single pass Authenticated Encryption (AE) scheme that is designed for protecting both message confidentiality and its authenticity. This makes AE very attractive for low-cost low-power hardware implementation. For test and performance evaluation the design has been implemented in Xilinx Spartan-3 sxc3s700an FPGA. Additionally, this paper analyzes different hardware architectures and explores area/delay tradeoffs in the implementation.