The National Security Agency had today published
"Hardware Performance Simulations of Round 2
Advanced Encryption Standard Algorithms," a 55-page
report:
http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/round2/NSA-AESfinalreport.pdf (165K)
Its abstract:
"The National Security Agency is providing hardware simulation
support and performance measurements to aid NIST in their
selection of the AES algorithm. Although much of the Round 1
analysis focused on software, much more attention will be
directed towards hardware implementation issues in the
Round 2 analysis. As NIST has stated, a common set of
assumptions will be essential in comparing the hardware
efficiency of the finalists. This paper presents a technical
overview of the methods and approaches used to analyze
the Round 2 candidate algorithms (MARS, RC6, RIJNDAEL,
SERPENT and TWOFISH) in 0.5um CMOS-based hardware.
Both design procedures and architectures will be presented
to provide an overview of each of the algorithms and the
methods used. To cover a wide range of potential hardware
applications, two distinct architectures will be targeted for
comparison, specifically a medium speed, small area iterated
version and a high speed, large area pipelined version.
The standard design approach will consist of creating
hardware models using VHDL and an underlying library of
cryptographic components to completely describe each
algorithm. Once generated, the model can be verified for
correctness through simulation and comparison to test
vectors, and synthesized to a common CMOS hardware
library for performance analysis. Hardware performance
data will be collected for a variety of design constraints
for each of the algorithms to ensure a wide range of
measured data. A summary report of the findings will be
presented to demonstrate algorithm performance across
a wide range of metrics, such as speed, area, and throughput.
This report will provide a common baseline of information,
which will enable NIST and the community to compare the
hardware performance of the algorithms relative to one
another."
