Design of an extremely high performance counter mode AES reconfigurable processor

Abstract

In this paper, we presented our implementation of a counter mode AES processor based on the Xilinx Virtex2 FPGA platform. We have studied different techniques to implement the AES rijndael algorithm in reconfigurable hardware and choose the proper method to further optimize the structure of the cipher. This result in a clock frequency of 212.5 mHz and translate to throughput of 27.1 Gb/s, the highest throughput that have ever reported. We also, in this paper, compared the operation modes of AES, their security and efficiency.