Revisiting AES SBox Composite Field Implementations for FPGAs

Abstract

Composite fields are used for implementing the advanced encryption standard (AES) SBox when compact and side-channel resistant constructions are required. The prior art has investigated efficient implementations of such SBoxes for application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) platforms. On field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs); however, due to the considerably different structure compared with ASICs, these implementations perform poorly. In this letter, we revisit composite field AES SBox implementations for FPGAs. We show how design choices and optimizations can be made to better suit the granular look-up tables that are present in modern FPGAs. We investigate 2880 SBox constructions and show that about half of them are better than the state-of-the-art composite field implementation. Our best SBox implementation is 18% smaller compared with the state-of-the-art implementation on an FPGA.