A grain in the silicon: SCA-protected AES in less than 30 slices

AES is the predominant block cipher used worldwide in many cryptographic applications. Despite of the wealth of already available implementations, we here introduce an ultra-lightweight AES-128 implementation specifically tailored for reconfigurable hardware. Our basic proposal presents a full AES-128 providing 9.12 Mbit/s throughput and occupying just 21 slices of a Spartan-6 and no additional memories. We also show that this architecture almost, inherently supports shuffling as side-channel countermeasure and provide results of a practical evaluation. Our protected design fits into 24 slices providing 7.82 Mbit/s throughput. Finally, we present a complete AES core that combines previous results with random number generation which fits 28 slices at 4.35 Mbit/s throughput.