Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI) Analysis: Security, Performance, and Power Consumption

Abstract

Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI), which is a hardware accelerated version of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), are a set of instructions that enable fast and secure data encryption and decryption. AES-NI consists of seven instructions and supports all usage and modes of operations of AES. In this paper, we analyze AES-NI from security, performance, and power consumption perspectives. We compare AES-NI with the traditional AES. Through our experiments, we measure confusion, diffusion, randomness, as well as encryption and decryption speed, and power consumption. Our experiments are carried out on different processor platforms and with different encryption workloads. Our experimental results show that AES-NI achieves up to 13.5x speed over AES at 90% reduced energy consumption over AES. The low energy footprint makes AES-NI a candidate for secure communication for IoT and other lightweight edge devices.