A comparison of two approaches providing data encryption and authentication on a processor memory bus

Abstract

This paper presents a comparison of two engines providing encryption and authentication of data exchanged between a System on Chip (SoC) and its external memory. The first engine is based on a generic composition scheme, meaning that each required security service, confidentiality and authentication, is guaranteed by a dedicated algorithm i.e. respectively AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and CBC-MAC (Message Authentication Code). The second one, called PE-ICE (Parallelized Encryption and Integrity Checking Engine), uses AES encryption to provide both properties to data by adding the authentication capability to block cipher. Performance evaluations show that our scheme PE-ICE always outperforms the combination of AES encryption and CBC-MAC. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.