A Low-Area Unified Hardware Architecture for the AES and the Cryptographic Hash Function Grøstl

This article describes the design of an 8-bit coprocessor for the AES (encryption, decryption, and key expansion) and the cryptographic hash function Grøstl on several Xilinx FPGAs. Our Arithmetic and Logic Unit performs a single instruction that allows for implementing AES encryption, AES decryption, AES key expansion, and Grøstl at all levels of security. Thanks to a careful organization of AES and Grøstl internal states in the register file, we manage to generate all read and write addresses by means of a modulo-128 counter and a modulo-256 counter. A fully autonomous implementation of Grøstl and AES on a Virtex-6 FPGA requires 169 slices and a single 36k memory block, and achieves a competitive throughput. Assuming that the security guarantees of Grøstl are at least as good as the ones of the other SHA-3 finalists, our results show that Grøstl is the best candidate for low-area cryptographic coprocessors.