Authenticated Encryption for Low-Power Reconfigurable Wireless Devices

With the rapid growth of new wireless communication standards, a solution
that is capable of providing a seamless shift between existing wireless protocols and high flexibility as well as capability is crucial. Technology based
on reconfigurable devices offers this flexibility. In order to avail this enabling
technology, these radios have to propose cryptographic services such as con-
fidentiality, integrity and authentication. Therefore, integration of security
services to these low-power devices is very challenging and crucial as they
have limited resources and computational capabilities.
In this paper, we present a crypto solution for reconfigurable devices.
The solution is a single pass Authenticated Encryption (AE) scheme that
is designed for protecting both message confidentiality and its authenticity.
This makes AE very attractive for low-cost low-power hardware implementation. For test and performance evaluation the design has been implemented
in Xilinx Spartan-3 sxc3s700an FPGA. Additionally, this paper analyzes
different hardware architectures and explores area/delay tradeoffs in the
implementation.