Improving Hardware Implementation of Cryptographic AES Algorithm and the Block Cipher Modes of Operation

With ever increasing Internet traffic, more business and financial transactions are being conducted online. This is even more so during these days of COVID-19 pandemic when traditional businesses such as traditional face to face educational systems have gone online requiring huge amount of data being exchanged over Internet. Increase in the volume of data sent over the Internet has also increased the security vulnerabilities such as challenging the confidentiality of data being sent over the Internet. Due to sheer volume, all data will need to be effectively encrypted. Due to increase in the volume of data, it is also important to have encryption/decryption functions to work at a higher speed to maintain the confidentiality of sensitive data. In this thesis, our goal is to enhance the hardware speed of encryption process of the standard AES scheme and its four variants such as AES-128, AES-192, AES-256 and new AES-512 and implement such functions on an FPGA. We also consider the FPGA implementation of different modes of AES operation. By employing parallelism and pipelining approach, we attempt to speed up various computational components of AES implementations using the Quartus II onto Intel’s FPGA. This approach shows improvement in the response speed, data throughput and latency