A Study of AES Software Implementation for IoT Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical objects. This concept enables data exchange between connected things without human intervention. However, the devices being constrained in resources in terms of computing power, memory storage, and energy sources, implementation of traditional security encryption algorithms is not suitable for these devices. It is important to develop light weight low power security solutions for IoT devices and implementations. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the widely used standard encryption method and could be considered to provide security to IoT based networks. However, standard AES needs to be optimised in terms of energy savings, and reduced area for implementation. The approach of software implementation of the AES is associated with high latency. It is, therefore, important to explore the implementation of the AES on hardware in area-restricted way. In this work, we present an architecture of 8-bit data path aiming to achieve reduced area for hardware implementation.