As of today, cryptographic algorithms are widely used within many applications. Here it is especially the emerging field of real-time applications like network security, conditional access, and digital rights management which have great demands towards bandwidth and throughput. Examples are virtual private networking, streaming of pay-tv broadcasts, or conferencing. Plain hardware solutions are able to fulfill these requirements. However, these are typically limited to one algorithm and do not allow exchange of this algorithm by software update methods. Similarly, for configurable algorithms like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) many cores support only one configuration rather than all of them. Usual software solutions based on programmable general purpose hardware offer great flexibility but do not fulfill the bandwidth and throughput requirements. This work delivers a different approach: Based on the analysis of certain crypto algorithms and economic and technical requirements, a novel programmable architecture for crypto processors has been developed. Despite its programmability, the proposed architecture shows crypto performance not only similar but even better than several existing hardware solutions. This performance is not only achieved by tailoring the general architecture towards the needs of cryptographic algorithms, it is also a result of a special memory access method and supporting arithmetic operations.
«
As of today, cryptographic algorithms are widely used within many applications. Here it is especially the emerging field of real-time applications like network security, conditional access, and digital rights management which have great demands towards bandwidth and throughput. Examples are virtual private networking, streaming of pay-tv broadcasts, or conferencing. Plain hardware solutions are able to fulfill these requirements. However, these are typically limited to one algorithm and do not a...
»