Fast Low Level Disk Encryption Using FPGAs

A fixed length tweakable enciphering scheme (TES) is the appropriate cryptographic functionality for low level disk encryption. Research on TES over the last two decades have led to a number of proposals many of which have already been implemented using FPGAs. This paper considers the FPGA implementations of two more recent and promising TESs, namely AEZ and FAST. The relevant architectures are described and simulation results on the Xilinx Virtex 5 and Virtex 7 FPGAs are presented. For comparison, two IEEE standard schemes, XCB and EME2 are considered. The results indicate that FAST outperforms the other schemes making it a serious candidate for future incorporation by disk manufacturers and standardisation bodies.