
IJCSI International Journal of Computer Science Issues, Vol. 2, 2009
ISSN (Online): 1694-0784
ISSN (Print): 1694-0814
33
Self-Partial and Dynamic Reconfiguration Implementation for
AES using FPGA
Zine El Abidine ALAOUI ISMAILI and Ahmed MOUSSA
Innovative Technologies Laboratory,
National School of Applied Sciences,
Tangier, PBox 1818, Morocco
Abstract
This paper addresses efficient hardware/software implementation
approaches for the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)
algorithm and describes the design and performance testing
algorithm for embedded system.
Also, with the spread of reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs
(Field Programmable Gate Array) embedded cryptographic
hardware became cost-effective. Nevertheless, it is worthy to
note that nowadays, even hardwired cryptographic algorithms are
not so safe.
From another side, the self-reconfiguring platform is reported
that enables an FPGA to dynamically reconfigure itself under the
control of an embedded microprocessor. Hardware acceleration
significantly increases the performance of embedded systems
built on programmable logic. Allowing a FPGA-based
MicroBlaze processor to self-select the coprocessors uses can
help reduce area requirements and increase a system's versatility.
The architecture proposed in this paper is an optimal hardware
implementation algorithm and takes dynamic partially
reconfigurable of FPGA. This implementation is good solution to
preserve confidentiality and accessibility to the information in
the numeric communication.
Key words: Cryptography; Embedded systems; Reconfigurable
computing; Self-reconfiguration
1. Introduction
Today, ultra deep submicronic technologies offer high
scale density of integration for communication systems.
This growth in integration has been accompanied with
dramatically increase of complexity and transaction speed
of this systems. As a consequence, security becomes a
challenge and a critical issue especially for real time
applications where materiel and software resources are
very precious and necessary to provide a minimum of
service quality.
Indeed, today speed and computing power impose the
recourse to sophisticated and more complicated
cryptography algorithms for high level security. Full
software implementation is very heavy and slows down
considerably speed of the information exchange. From
another side, full hardware implementation is very
expensive in terms of area, power and can also deteriorate
speed of information transitions. This can be done
dynamically at run-time and without user interaction,
while the static part of the chip is not interrupted. The idea
we put into practice is a coarse-grained partially
dynamically reconfigurable implementation of a
cryptosystem.
Our prototype implementation consists of a FPGA which
is partially reconfigured at run-time to provide
countermeasures against physical attacks. The static part is
only configured upon system reset. Some advantages of
dynamic reconfiguration for cryptosystems have been
explored before [1, 2, 3]. In such systems, the main goal of
dynamic reconfigurability is to use the available hardware
resources in an optimal way. This is the first work that
considers using a coarse-grained partially dynamically
reconfigurable architecture in cryptosystems to prevent
physical attacks by introducing temporal and/or spatial
jitter [4, 5].
This paper presents an optimal implementation of the AES
(Advanced Encryption Standard) cryptography algorithm
by the use of a dynamic partially reconfigurable FPGA [6].
The reconfigurable aspect adapts the allowed basic bloc
size to both the loop number and the size of the provided
information, and makes all the AES blocs reconfigurable.
The paper is organized as follows: section 2 describes the
AES algorithm. Reconfigurable FPGA and self
reconfigurable methodology is presented in section 3, 4
and 5. The proposed methodology of algorithm