Implementation of Fast Pipelined AES Algorithm on Xilinx FPGA

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a specification for the encryption of electronic data also called Rijndael. The algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data. Hardware-based cryptography is used for authentication of users and of software updates and installations. Software implementations can generally not be used for this, as the cryptographic keys are stored in the PC memory during execution, and are vulnerable to malicious codes. Hardware-based encryption products can also vary in the level of protection they provide against brute force rewind attacks, Offline parallel attacks, or other cryptanalysis attacks. The algorithm was implemented in FPGA due to its flexibility and reconfiguration capability. A reconfigurable device is very convenient for a cryptography algorithm since it allows cheap and quick alterations. The implementation of pipelined cryptography hardware was used to improve performance in order to achieve higher throughput and greater parallelism. The AES hardware was implemented in three modules contains of the encryption, the decryption and the key expansion module.