Design of a reconfigurable cryptographic engine

Abstract

Cryptographic algorithms are usually compute-intensive and more efficiently implemented in hardware than in software. By taking advantage of FPGA technology, some work offers high performance and flexible solutions for cryptographic algorithms. But FPGAs still have some drawbacks. To overcome inherent shortages of FPGA, a novel asynchronous reconfigurable cryptographic engine (ARCEN) is introduced. In this architecture, reconfigurable cryptographic array is the kernel. It routes signals asynchronously between adjacent cells through Neighbor-to-Neighbor wires with 4-phase handshaking protocol. Computation circuit for reconfigurable cell is developed with modified DSDCVS logic. Experiment results show that the architecture has a better performance than FPGA. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.