AES Engine Research Articles

AES Engineering forms new company in Australia

In a move that is in line with its ongoing global growth strategy, UK-based AES Engineering Group Ltd has formed a partnership with two companies in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, to launch new company Aesseal NSW Pty Ltd.

Acquisition strengthens AES Engineering's position in Canada

Canadian company Performance Compression and Sealing (PCS), which supplies fluid sealing products and services, has sold a controlling stake in its sealing business to UK-based AES Engineering Ltd.

Retrofitting Leakage Resilient Authenticated Encryption to Microcontrollers

The security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices relies on fundamental concepts such as cryptographically protected firmware updates. In this context attackers usually have physical access to a device and therefore side-channel attacks have to be considered. This makes the protection of required cryptographic keys and implementations challenging, especially for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) microcontrollers that typically have no hardware countermeasures. In this work, we demonstrate how unprotected hardware AES engines of COTS microcontrollers can be efficiently protected against side-channel attacks by constructing a leakage resilient pseudo random function (LR-PRF). Using this side-channel protected building block, we implement a leakage resilient authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) scheme that enables secured firmware updates. We use concepts from leakage resilience to retrofit side-channel protection on unprotected hardware AES engines by means of software-only modifications. The LR-PRF construction leverages frequent key changes and low data complexity together with key dependent noise from parallel hardware to protect against side-channel attacks. Contrary to most other protection mechanisms such as time-based hiding, no additional true randomness is required. Our concept relies on parallel S-boxes in the AES hardware implementation, a feature that is fortunately present in many microcontrollers as a measure to increase performance. In a case study, we implement the protected AEAD scheme for two popular ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers with differing parallelism. We evaluate the protection capabilities in realistic IoT attack scenarios, where non-invasive EM probes or power consumption measurements are employed by the attacker. We show that the concept provides the side-channel hardening that is required for the long-term security of IoT devices.

Embedded System Confidentiality Protection by Cryptographic Engine Implemented with Composite Field Arithmetic

Embedded systems are subjecting to various kinds of security threats. Some malicious attacks exploit valid code gadgets to launch destructive actions or to reveal critical details. Some previous memory encryption strategies aiming at this issue suffer from unacceptable performance overhead and resource consumption. This paper proposes a hardware based confidentiality protection method to secure the code and data stored and transferred in embedded systems. This method takes advantage of the I/D-cache structure to reduce the frequency of the cryptographic encryption and decryption processing. We implement the AES engine with composite field arithmetic to reduce the cost of hardware implementation. The proposed architecture is implemented on EP2C70 FPGA chip with OpenRisc 1200 based SoC. The experiment results show that the AES engine is required to work only in the case of I/D-cache miss and the hardware implementation overhead can save 53.24% and 13.39% for the AES engine and SoC respectively.

Seal manufacturer receives four Queen's Awards

The AES Engineering Ltd. Group, trading as AESSEAL, has received two Queen's Awards for Industry 2009 for Innovation and Sustainable Development. Separately two further awards have been received by the Northern Irish subsidiary of the company.

A Desktop Computer with a Reconfigurable Pentium®

Advancements in reconfigurable technologies, specifically FPGAs, have yielded faster, more power-efficient reconfigurable devices with enormous capacities. In our work, we provide testament to the impressive capacity of recent FPGAs by hosting a complete Pentium ® in a single FPGA chip. In addition we demonstrate how FPGAs can be used for microprocessor design space exploration while overcoming the tension between simulation speed, model accuracy, and model completeness found in traditional software simulator environments. Specifically, we perform preliminary experimentation/prototyping with an original Socket 7 based desktop processor system with typical hardware peripherals running modern operating systems such as Fedora Core 4 and Windows XP; however we have inserted a Xilinx Virtex-4 in place of the processor that should sit in the motherboard and have used the Virtex-4 to host a complete version of the Pentium ® microprocessor (which consumes less than half its resources). We can therefore apply architectural changes to the processor and evaluate their effects on the complete desktop system. We use this FPGA-based emulation system to conduct preliminary architectural experiments including growing the branch target buffer and the level 1 caches. In addition, we experimented with interfacing hardware accelerators such as DES and AES engines which resulted in a 27x speedup.

3i increases holding in AES Engineering

3i increases holding in AES Engineering

AES Engineering starts up seal support division

AES Engineering starts up seal support division