A Hardware Approach to Simulate and Compare AES and DES Using Xilinx FPGA Platform


Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Middlesex University, School of Engineering and Information Sciences, Computer Communications , İngiltere

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2011

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: Saeid Taherkhani

Danışman: Enver Ever

Özet:

Data Encryption Standard (DES) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are two symmetric cryptographic algorithms. These methods scramble the plaintext or message in a way that it can only be understood by parties involved in communication. In these techniques, there is only one key to encrypt or decrypt the message called as shared key or single key. Sender, in one side, encrypt the message by shared key and in the other side of communication, once receiver receive the cipher message, it uses shared key to decrypt the scrambled message to get the original plaintext.

 

DES and AES are different in the message and key size that they support and also in the technique to generate the cipher text. In this thesis, we simulate the algorithms by using a Hardware Description Language (HDL) in order to compare them in terms of speed and area that they occupy in a specific programmable hardware chip. A development tool for this purpose is a software package from XILINX Company, called ISE Design Suite, system edition. ISE is used to program, simulate, implement and evaluate both algorithms. The program code is written by Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL). 

 

Results obtained by simulation of both algorithms in same FPGA chip show that AES occupy more area than DES. The operating clock frequency of AES design is 50.24% less than DES design. Results also indicate that throughput of AES design is 113.3% more than DES design. The main reasons behind the results are, firstly AES uses 128 bits data while DES is based on 64 bits data and secondly AES has more complex algorithm and more and larger look-up tables than DES algorithm.

There are some techniques that improve the theoretical part of DES such as [14] and others speed up the DES designed chip based on the different implementation approaches such as [15], [16]. The last fastest and fully pipelined implementation of DES was declared by Xilinx Company in [16] where the modification is applied on the implementation part and not on the theoretical part of DES algorithm. The Throughput of this design is 15.1 Gbps using VirtexII FPGA platform. In current project the standard definition of DES is used. Using novel approach in current project in the key scheduler part of DES makes design faster with the throughput up to 18.82 Gbps by using Virtex 6 FPGA technology.

Similarly in AES implementation, there are different approaches to implement S-BOX such as [17], [18], [19], [20], [21]. In Look-up table implementation of S-BOX, memory is used to keep the LUTs. This block RAM memory has a constant fetch cycle with duration of 1 clock cycle. In the other hand, dynamic implementation of S-BOX, the data can be dynamically generated and there is no need to use constant amount of memory to keep the LUT data. Although, in order to read the data 4 clock cycles are needed. So there is a trade-off between memory area and delay in these two approaches. In current project, LUTs are implemented by the first approach, keeping some area in FPGA only for LUTs. So the delay due to the dynamic implementation is not applicable here, although we assign some area for LUT and we can’t utilize this area.  The throughput of current AES is 10.24 Gbps which is significantly more than the design in [17] as one of fast AES implementation.