Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

Using today's modern communication technologies, a huge number of electronic financial transactions are taking place everyday among a wide spectrum of users including banks, businesses and individuals over open networks. However, because of the nature of the open networks, there exist serious security threats concerning authentication, data integrity, confidentiality, etc. In order to reduce such threats, many communications systems are becoming increasingly equipped with some form of cryptosystems. Galois/counter mode (GCM) of operation is an authenticated encryption scheme recommended by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) through Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). GCM is 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 the confidential 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 for ultra high performance GCM. We will devise sub-quadratic area complexity algorithms for finite field operations needed for GCM authentication. We will investigate methods to increase the GCM throughput and will 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 Canadian industry as well as government organizations dealing with communication security.