Design of a novel hardware data structure for cryptographic applications

Over the last two decades there has been a considerable increase in the adoption of security solutions in enterprise networks, e-commerce websites and databases management systems. It is important for companies, banks, government departments and any other institution not only to create a secure connection over the ever-expanding networks but also not to slow down their system throughput by the implementation of these security solutions. Most of the communication security is implemented using cryptographic algorithms. Applications for these algorithms are considered compute-intensive applications. Therefore, cryptographic algorithms are implemented in custom hardware seeking higher performance than the software implementation running on general-purpose processors. In this paper we present a new hardware data structure, namely the Shufflebox. This hardware data structure replaces the simple register file or scratch memory needed in any cryptographic engine to store subkeys, S-box values or just temporary results. The Shufflebox is a rectangular array of bits that can store, XOR and rotate all bits in all directions. It allows efficient implementation of these cryptographic-wise critical operations. The hardware implementation that employs this hardware data structure achieves a speedup between 6x and 18x over conventional implementations.