FPGA-based implementation of a substitution box cryptographic co-processor for high-performance applications

Abstract

The increasing demand for reliable cryptographic operations for securing current systems has given birth to well-advanced and developed hardware solutions, in this paper we consider issues within the traditional symmetric advanced encryption standard (AES) cryptographic system as major challenges. Additionally, problems such as throughput limitations, reliability, and unified key management are also discussed and tackled through appropriate hierarchical transformation techniques. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents the design and field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based implementation of a cryptographic coprocessor optimized for substitution box (S-Box) operation which is considered as a key component in many cryptographic algorithms such as AES. The architecture of the co-processor proposed in this article is based on the advanced characteristics of FPGAs to accelerate the S-Box transformation, improve throughput and reduce latency compared to software implementations. We discussed carefully the design considerations along with resource utilization, speed optimization, and energy efficiency. The obtained experimental results present significant performance improvements, the FPGA-based implementation ensured higher throughput and lower execution time compared to traditional central processing unit (CPU)-based methods. We presented in this work the effectiveness of using FPGAs for the acceleration of cryptographic operations in secure applications which will therefore be a robust solution for the next generation of secure systems.