International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, Volume 2021

The design of scalar AES Instruction Set Extensions for RISC-V


Ben Marshall
Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol

G. Richard Newell
Microchip Technology Inc., USA

Dan Page
Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol

Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen
PQShield, UK

Claire Wolf
Symbiotic EDA


Keywords: ISE, AES, RISC-V


Abstract

Secure, efficient execution of AES is an essential requirement on most computing platforms. Dedicated Instruction Set Extensions (ISEs) are often included for this purpose. RISC-V is a (relatively) new ISA that lacks such a standardized ISE. We survey the state-of-the-art industrial and academic ISEs for AES, implement and evaluate five different ISEs, one of which is novel. We recommend separate ISEs for 32 and 64-bit base architectures, with measured performance improvements for an AES-128 block encryption of 4x and 10x with a hardware cost of 1.1K and 8.2K gates respectively, when compared to a software-only implementation based on use of T-tables. We also explore how the proposed standard bit-manipulation extension to RISC-V can be harnessed for efficient implementation of AES-GCM. Our work supports the ongoing RISC-V cryptography extension standardisation process.

Publication

Transactions of Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, Volume 2021, Issue 1

Paper

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Artifact number
tches/2021/a3

Artifact published
February 16, 2021

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This work is licensed under the MIT License.

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BibTeX How to cite

Marshall, B., Newell, G. R., Page, D., Saarinen, M.-J. O., & Wolf, C. (2020). The design of scalar AES Instruction Set Extensions for RISC-V. IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, 2021(1), 109–136. https://doi.org/10.46586/tches.v2021.i1.109-136. Artifact at https://artifacts.iacr.org/tches/2021/a3.