Efficient unified hardware implementation of multiple ciphers

A method for creating unified, efficient hardware implementations for multiple symmetric ciphers is described. For a chosen set of two or more distinct types of symmetric ciphers, a unified substitution box (SBOX) is designed that can implement most of the operations in a single hardware block, with small hardware blocks added before and after the unified SBOX for unique operations of each distinct symmetric cipher. Optimization techniques can also be applied to the linear operations and SBOX operations for the chosen set, rather than individually for each symmetric cipher, of the two or more distinct types of symmetric ciphers.