Open AccessSmashing the Implementation Records of AES S-box
Author(s) -
Arash Reyhani-Masoleh,
Mostafa Taha,
Doaa Ashmawy
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
iacr transactions on cryptographic hardware and embedded systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2569-2925
DOI - 10.46586/tches.v2018.i2.298-336
Subject(s) - s box , heuristics , computer science , white box , block (permutation group theory) , box model , logic gate , minification , black box , algorithm , computer engineering , mathematics , block cipher , programming language , cryptography , operating system , software engineering , artificial intelligence , geometry , climatology , geology
Canright S-box has been known as the most compact S-box design since its introduction back in CHES’05. Boyar-Peralta proposed logic-minimization heuristics that could reduce the gate count of Canright S-box from 120 gates to 113 gates, however synthesis results did not reflect much improvement. In CHES’15, Ueno et al. proposed an S-box that has a slightly higher area, but significantly faster than the previous designs, hence it was the most efficient (measured by area×delay) S-box implementation to date. In this paper, we propose two new designs for the AES S-box. One design has a smaller implementation area than both Canright and the 113-gate S-boxes. Hence, our first design is the smallest AES S-box to date, breaking the 13 years implementation record of Canright. The second design is faster and smaller than the Ueno S-box. Hence, our second design is both the fastest and the most efficient S-box design to date. While doing so, we also propose new logicminimization heuristics that outperform the previous algorithms of Boyar-Peralta. Finally, we conduct an exhaustive evaluation of each and every block in the S-box circuit, using both structural and behavioral HDL modeling, to reach the optimum synergy between theoretical algorithms and technology-supported optimization tools. We show that involving the technology-supported CAD tools in the analysis results in several counter-intuitive results.