Efficient Hardware Architecture of SEED S-box for Smart Cards

This paper presents an efficient architecture that optimizes the design of SEED S-box using composite field arithmetic. SEED is the Korean standard 128-bit block cipher algorithm developed by Korea Information Security Agency. The nonlinear function S-box is the most costly operation in terms. of size and power consumption, taking up more than 30% of the entire SEED circuit. Therefore the S-box design can become a crucial factor when implemented in systems where resources are limited such as smart cards. In this paper, we transform elements in $GF(2^8)$ to composite field $GF(((2^2)^2)^2)$ where more efficient computations can be implemented and transform the computed result back to $GF(2^8)$. This technique reduces the S-box portion to 15% and the entire SEED algorithm can be implemented at 8,700 gates using Samsung smart card CMOS technology.