ABSTRACT
Wireless communications have become an attractive and interesting sector for
the provision of electronic services. Mobile networks are available almost
anytime, anywhere and the user’s acceptance of wireless devices is high.
One of the major scopes of the wireless protocols and especially of wireless
application protocol (WAP) [1] is to bring the Internet applications to
mobile devices [2-5]. Security is a key issue in the world of electronic
communication, especially for services with a sensitive purpose such as
electronic commerce and online banking. New ciphers have been developed
[6] to support the networks’ defense against the increasing range of attacks.
Optimizations of the security layer specifications have also been published in
the last year [7]. However, the time overhead due to data encryption should
not impose an intolerant penalty on the communication process. Almost all
the ciphers of today have an important drawback: the slowness of their
operation, due to the mathematic and logic transformations. Because software
implementations are too slow, even running in fast processors, the use of
specific hardware modules seems to be the only reasonable solution for
the requested high performance. Different designs have been proposed
for the hardware implementation of ciphers [8-22]. These works present the
implementation of one cipher in a hardware device at a time. Modern applied
cryptography in the wireless communications networks demands powerful
encryption engines with special purposes of privacy, authentication, and
integrity. In order to support these security needs efficiently, hardware secur-
ity engines have to be implemented in a single hardware module because of
the restricted availability of resources for mobile devices. It is necessary that a
set of ciphers is integrated in the same chip for the security layers of wireless
protocols. The implementations of ciphers in different hardware devices, one
for each algorithm, have proved to be insufficient and forbidden solutions in
the wireless world.
