A highly parallel AES-GCM core for authenticated encryption of 400 Gb/s network protocols

Abstract

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) together with the Galois Counter Mode (GCM) of operation has been approved for use in several high throughput network protocols to provide authenticated encryption. However, the demand for continued increase in network bandwidth has not abated and we anticipate the need for continual performance improvement of AES-GCM in hardware. Additionally, as data interfaces become wider and segmented, existing methods of GCM parallelization become inefficient. This paper presents a novel scalable architecture for highly parallel implementations of AES-GCM that can process multiple separately-keyed packets simultaneously every clock cycle. We demonstrate throughputs of 482 Gb/s in a single Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale FPGA and describe how the architecture can be used to achieve over 800 Gb/s in a system comprising multiple FPGAs.