Recently, Barkan and Biham proposed the concept of dual ciphers and pointed out that there are 240 dual ciphers of AES (Dual
AES). An interesting application of dual ciphers is to design a cipher which run faster than the original cipher. In this
paper, we first generalize the dual AES and propose a complete setup procedure to determine all dual ciphers. Then, a hardware
implementation of AES based on the combination of dual cipher and composite field is proposed. We demonstrate that our AES
design not only offers better performance and smaller area requirement than the design proposed by Wolkerstorfer et al which
uses a composite field only. Our results confirm Barkan et al.’s conjecture that it is possible to design an AES cipher more
efficiency than ever.