A Survey of Hardware-Based AES SBoxes: Area, Performance, and Security
Phaedra Sophia Curlin, Jeff Heiges, Calvin Chan, Tamara Silbergleit Lehman · ACM Computing Surveys · 2025
Hardware-based cryptographic engines are increasingly important in hardware design as they offer stronger security guarantees compared to software. However, their complex design and lack of freely available test chips make it difficult to compare across different implementations. This work reviews some of the current implementations of one of the most used cryptographic algorithms, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). We synthesize the large amount of information that has been published over the last two decades by introducing the first comprehensive comparison of AES’s most complex component, the Substitution Box (SBox), with regard to area, critical path delay, power, and security trade-offs.