The AES-IP-38 (EIP-38) is IP for accelerating the AES symmetric cipher algorithm supporting GCM or XTS modes at extreme speeds up to 100 Gbps+ @ 850 MHz. Designed for fast integration, fast key switching and high performance, the AES-IP-38 accelerator provides a reliable and cost-effective embedded IP solution that is easy to integrate into high speed crypto pipelines. The IP supports Cipher Text Stealing (CTS) in combination with AES-XTS.
The AES-IP-38 is a family of the cryptographic library elements in the Rambus hardware IP library (formerly of Inside Secure). For example, the AES-IP-38 is the cipher core embedded in all MACSec protocol aware security engines. The accelerators include I/O registers, encryption and decryption cores, and the logic for feedback modes and key scheduling.
Even though the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm was designed to allow high-speed implementations, its regular feedback modes such as CBC, CFB, and OFB are not ideal for supporting very high-speed networking applications. The AES-GCM and AES-XTS algorithms do not use these regular AES feedback modes and allow very high-speed encryption and authentication by enabling an implementation to make use of parallelism. Typical uses cases for AES-GCM and AES-XTS are high-speed transmission (virtual private networking) and disk storage (protection of data at rest). For transmission protection, AES-GCM can for instance implement authenticated encryption at the network layer (IPsec) or at the data link layer (IEEE 802.1ae). The AES-GCM (Galois Counter Mode) has, since its publication in 2005, been used in many IPsec and MACsec applications. It is a very efficient algorithm, suitable to achieve very high performances. AES-XTS has been adopted by IEEE P1619 for protection of data at rest. The AES-IP-38 also supports the legacy AES-LRW algorithm. Within the AES-IP-38 product family a range of AES-XTS configurations is available that allows efficient key switching while maintaining throughputs for small sector sizes, ex- and including CTS.
Sustained performance for any object sizes ranges from 6 to 100 Gbps+ depending on the configuration and area. Gate count is between 90K and 650K gates depending on the configuration. Multiple AES-IP-38 cores can be cascaded. Tailored for storage solutions, a dedicated configuration offering full key and data path integrity is available.
