Flexi-AES: A Highly-Parameterizable Cipher for a Wide Range of Design Constraints

Abstract

Interconnected devices communicate efficiently and securely over untrusted networks via security protocols that employ various encryption algorithms, often as hardware modules. State-of-the-art hardware implementations typically focus on optimizing a single metric and are tedious to adapt to a wider set of design constraints. In this work, we develop an open-source, flexible and parameterizable hardware implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). We present a feature-rich implementation in Chisel that is simple to employ to any architectures and to fine-tune to specific design requirements. Despite the larger design space, we use 50% fewer lines of code than existing Verilog versions, thus enabling a higher level of development productivity.