Implementation of a High-Performance Blowfish for Secure Wireless Communication

Security has become an important concern in wireless communication systems both for the users and the providers. Without a secure medium, users can have their transmissions eavesdropped or sensitive information tapped. Therefore, this paper focuses on the implementation of security algorithm, which is best embedded in the mobile devices. It is well known that most wireless communication standards implement an advanced encryption standard (AES) as a security algorithm. However, the AES is a complex algorithm that consumes a larger design core, time, and power source. Hence, a high-performance Blowfish algorithm is proposed and developed using a Zynq-7000 field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The performance is analyzed in terms of its architecture, throughput, and power consumption. Results show that the proposed Blowfish reduces slice usage by 63% and increases throughput by 29% at low power consumption.