A high performance reconfigurable implementation of DES-like algorithms

Reconfigurable computing has grown to become an important and large field of research. It offers advantages over traditional hardware and software implementation of computational algorithms. It is based on using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which can be configured after fabrication to take advantage of a hardware design but still maintain the flexibility of software. Particular applications, including encryption, which involve repetitive computation, and have inherent parallelism, are specifically well suited to the use of FPGAs. In this paper, we implemented four DES-like algorithms namely DES, DESX, Biham-DES, and Sⁿ DES on a reconfigurable hardware so that each algorithm could be replaced by another with low reconfiguration overhead time. This kind of implementation not only has high flexibility but also has an acceptable encryption rate compared with the fastest implementation of DES.