Implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in Chisel

Motivation

• Implement an open-source, transparent, secure encryption module in Chisel
• Equip developers with ready-to-use, efficient, parameterizable, encryption macros for RISC-V systems
• Compare performance and resource utilization of generated HDL with pure Verilog and Vivado HLS
• Compare code size with Verilog, Python, C++ and Vivado HLS as a index of development productivity

Features

• (more to come)
• Compact AES Cipher and Inverse Cipher Chisel implementation
• Basic side-channel attack defense based on LFSR noise
• IDE (IntelliJ) compatible

Instructions

• Run ./aes_tests.sh > logfile.txt to run all tests and store console output into logfile
• Generated Verilog will be in directory /test_run_dir
• Either gtkwave or dinotrace (or other wave viewer) can be used to display .vcd files

References

• Our implementations of AES in Python, C/C++, Vivado HLS: github.com/hplp/AES_implementations
• This project was created using the chisel-template from freechipsproject
• Other available Chisel IP Contributions
• Yet another AES implementation in Chisel: github.com/yaozhaosh/chisel-aes
• Best resource for learning Chisel: chisel-bootcamp
• Useful and highly recommeded Scala class on coursera

Citation

This work resulted in the folowwing publications:

@article{guo2022agile,
  title={Agile-AES: Implementation of configurable AES primitive with agile design approach},
  author={Guo, Xinfei and El-Hadedy, Mohamed and Mosanu, Sergiu and Wei, Xiangdong and Skadron, Kevin and Stan, Mircea R},
  journal={Integration},
  year={2022},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}
@inproceedings{mosanu2019flexi,
  title={Flexi-AES: A Highly-Parameterizable Cipher for a Wide Range of Design Constraints},
  author={Mosanu, Sergiu and Guo, Xinfei and El-Hadedy, Mohamed and Anghel, Lorena and Stan, Mircea},
  booktitle={2019 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM)},
  pages={338--338},
  year={2019},
  organization={IEEE}
}