FPGA-Based inline encryption bridge using AES-XTS for storage systems

This paper presents a hardware-based AES-256 XTS encryption system implemented on FPGA, providing a complete inline bridge between a storage controller and the storage device. Unlike prior works that focused only on AES core optimization, this design integrates the core into the full SATA protocol and evaluates end-to-end storage-path performance. The pipelined XTS-AES core enables high-throughput, real-time sector-level encryption with minimal performance impact. FPGA implementation offers flexibility in key sizes and encryption modes, supports algorithm updates through partial reconfiguration, and allows scalability to various storage systems, including NAS storage systems. The main contributions are: (i) proposing an FPGA-based inline encryption architecture with an AES-XTS core fully integrated into the SATA protocol; (ii) implementing and evaluating the encryption performance on a real storage system, demonstrating practical feasibility and transparency in real-time operations.