Implementing Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) on MathStar Field Programmable Object Arrays

The Rijndael encryption algorithm was selected by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in November of 2001. As the new encryption standard, it is being deployed on a large scale across many markets and applications that require data security. AES is used both to encrypt and decrypt information.

While software-only implementations are found in everything from file compression utilities to full operating systems, the speed of such implementations limits the use of AES in real-time communications and large, time-critical file transfers. This paper outlines several fast, flexible AES hardware implementations using MathStar's Arrix Family of Field Programmable Object Arrays (FPOAs).