Efficient Implementation of Lightweight MDS Matrix on FPGA

Abstract

Recently, studying of Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) matrix has become a topic of interest. The MDS matrix is the most important component of the diffusion layer in block ciphers. This paper introduces an optimized, low-cost hardware construction of Galois Field GF(2^8 ) 4×4 MDS matrix. The proposed design is implemented on Field programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The proposed design is synthesized targeting Virtex-7 FPGA using Xilinx ISE Design suite. Xilinx primitives LUT6 and LUT6_2 were used to control exactly the component placement in the design to maintain the minimum occupation area. The pipeline and parallel implementation techniques were used to improve the speed performance. The verification of the functionality of the proposed design has been proved using the ModelSim simulation tool. The synthesis result of the proposed design shows that, the new proposed architecture provides very competitive area and throughput trade-offs. In comparison with other related designs, the proposed design occupies the least area with the minimum time delay. The area of the developed MDS matrix design was significantly reduced, 68 LUT, with high throughput of 21.178 Gbps. The proposed design is a suitable candidate for lightweight cryptographic implementations.