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I am trying to make a byte-serial implementation of the AES 128-Bit in ECB-mode for my studies. I understand the "normal" (word-parallel) implementation of AES and the way of Eli Biham (bit-serial). Both extremes of the representation variants, namely bit-serial and word-parallel, were examined, but what is about byte-serial?

I don't understand how such an implementation could look like. Do I need to convert the SBox into logical gates? What is about the MixColumns and Shiftrow operation. Are they still for free, like at Eli Bihams representation?

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    $\begingroup$ Do you have a reference defining "byte serial", perhaps the same reference that apparently uses "bit serial" for what Eli Biham calls "bitslice"? If "byte serial" means "using a sequence of bytewide operations", that's very natural for AES, see e.g. this. $\endgroup$
    – fgrieu ♦
    Aug 1 at 7:49
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    $\begingroup$ Gentry, C., Halevi, S., Smart, N.P. (2012). Homomorphic Evaluation of the AES Circuit eprint.iacr.org/2012/099.pdf "In the byte sliced implementation we use sixteen distinct ciphertexts to represent a single state matrix... For the bit sliced implementation we represent the entire round function as a binary circuit, and we use 128 distinct ciphertexts (one per bit of the state matrix)" Like I understand, normal AES ist worparallel wich splits an input into 16 bytes. Byte-Serial uses 16 different inputs and Bit-slice uses 128 different inputs $\endgroup$
    – ChopaChupChup
    Aug 1 at 12:30
  • $\begingroup$ The word "serial" of the question and title is nowhere to be found in the article. That article uses "slice" or "sliced", and that's not the same as "serial". Also, the article is specifically about homomorphic evaluation of AES, something extremely specific and not mentioned in the question. So it remains hard to understand what the question is about, and in particular what it means by "byte-serial", and if it's about implementing AES, or implementing homomorphic evaluation of AES. $\endgroup$
    – fgrieu ♦
    Aug 1 at 12:50
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    $\begingroup$ In the article from my professor bit-serial and bitslice are equated. "As many encryption algorithms evaluate boolean functions during their execution, bit-serial (sometimes called bit-slice) computing in SIMD..." Eitschberger and Keller compared two implementations of AES, a bit-serial and word-parallel and made it possible to transform between the implementations. My task is now to implement the byte-serial method. And from here on my questions from above arise. $\endgroup$
    – ChopaChupChup
    Aug 1 at 13:06

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If "bit-serial and bitslice(d) are equated", the question is about what I'd call bytesliced AES, by analogy with bitsliced AES. That carries $k$ simulataneous AES operations on a machine with (I'll assume, exactly) $8k$-bit words, and uses steps that compute on $k$ bytes in parallel. Another slightly different possibility is that the question is about SIMD implementation of AES on hardware with $k$ bytewide ALUs.

The $k$ input blocks of 16 bytes are split into 16 words, each concatenating the bytes of a given rank in the input blocks. Like in bitsliced AES, ShiftRows thus reduces to selection of the appropriate word for the next step. AddRoundKey reduces to XOR with a word consisting of the same byte repeated $k$ times. More generally, when there's an addition of a byte in $\mathbb F_{2^8}$ prescribed by AES, we can perform that for all $k$ AES instances with a single word XOR.

In MixColumns, the same multiplicative coefficient in $\{1,2,3\}$ is applied to all bytes of a given word, easing implementation. Ideally there would be hardware support for parallel byte-wide arithmetic in $\mathbb F_{2^8}$ but lacking that, it's still possible to be fairly efficient in a high level language. e.g. for $k=8$ (64-bit words), multiplication in $\mathbb F_{2^8}$ of the bytes in w by $2$, could I think (not tested) go:

w = ( (0x8080808080808080 - (w>>7 & 0x0101010101010101)) & 0x1B1B1B1B1B1B1B1B
    ) ^ (w<<1 & 0xFEFEFEFEFEFEFEFE);

Note: a SIMD implementation can just use the usual

b = ((-(b>>7)) & 0x1B) ^ (b<<1);

The one difficult step is SubBytes, if there's no hardware support for it. I suspect some of the techniques there allow to slightly improve on going full bitwise, but I have nothing canned to propose. What's optimum surely depends on the available hardware.

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