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

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 IS...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ben Marshall, G. Richard Newell, Dan Page, Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen, Claire Wolf
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Ruhr-Universität Bochum 2020-12-01
Series:Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
Subjects:
ISE
AES
Online Access:https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/8729
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:2569-2925