On a High-Performance and Balanced Method of Hardware Implementation for AES

Hardware implementation provides a higher level of security and cryptography speed at some lower resource cost, compared to software implementation of AES. In this paper, we present a balanced hardware design and implementation for AES, considering several existing implementations. FPGA implementation offers higher speed solution and can be easily adapted to protocol changes, although the AES can be implemented with software or pure hardware. So, this implementation is equipped with regard to FPGA. Optimized and Synthesizable Verilog HDL is developed as the design entry to Quartus II 10.0 software. After obtaining gate-level netlists, timing simulations are performed using ModelSim SE 6.1f. Both 128 bits data block encryption and decryption processes are tested. The major part of an AES design is the realization of substitute boxes (S-boxes). S-boxes in our design are compared between two main existing implementations. With Quartus II device family of Stratix, throughput of up to 2.33 Gb/s is received.