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."
