A flexible and energy-efficient reconfigurable architecture for symmetric cipher processing

In this paper, a reconfigurable architecture for symmetric ciphers is presented. The InterConnection Tree between Rows (ICTR) reduces the complexity of interconnection based on the data locality of ciphers and finally decreases the area overhead. The Hierarchical Context Organization (HCO) scheme uses an index-based configuration mechanism to avoid the duplication of contexts and accelerate the dynamic configuration. Experimental results show that the architecture is capable of implementing most symmetric ciphers, such as AES, Camellia, DES, SHACAL-1, SMS4, SNOW3G and ZUC, etc. The results also show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art designs in both energy efficiency and area efficiency.