Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

Using today's modern communication technologies, a huge number of electronic financial transactions aretaking place everyday among a wide spectrum of users including banks, businesses and individuals over opennetworks. However, because of the nature of the open networks, there exist serious security threats concerningauthentication, data integrity, confidentiality, etc. In order to reduce such threats, many communicationssystems are becoming increasingly equipped with some form of cryptosystems.Galois/counter mode (GCM) of operation is an authenticated encryption scheme recommended by NationalInstitute of Standards and Technology (NIST) through Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). GCMis expected to be deployed widely and is primarily targeted to high throughput security applications (e.g.,Ethernet link security and IPsec), and provides assurance of confidentiality of data as well as authenticity of theconfidential data. GCM can also provide authentication assurance for additional data that is not encrypted.Our proposed research will address the development of efficient underlying algorithms and architectures forultra high performance GCM. We will devise sub-quadratic area complexity algorithms for finite fieldoperations needed for GCM authentication. We will investigate methods to increase the GCM throughput andwill apply formal methods to verify the underlying field operations.The knowledge and technology we expect to create in this project will be of great importance to Canadianindustry as well as government organizations dealing with communication security.