Project Funding:
Australian Research Council Grant (Small) 1998: $6,000
Xinlix Inc., USA 1997-9: Foundation Series Software

Project Team:
John Fulcher & Kashif Gilani (M.Comp.Sci. student)

Project Summary:
Exhaustive key search remains the most practical and efficient means of attacking the Data Encryption Standard - DES. With recent developments in Gate Array technology - both in terms of transistor counts and functionality - implementation of a parallel hardware DES cracking device has now become feasible, rather than via the more usual approaches of custom VLSI chips and/or supercomputer software.

2. IMPLEMENTATION OF PRIVATE-KEY DATA ENCRYPTION ALGORITHMS USING GATE ARRAYS

Project Funding:
Australian Research Council Grant (Small) 1999: $5,500
Xilinx University Program, USA 1997-9: Foundation Series Software

Project Team:
John Fulcher & Bernarto Tjahjono (M.Comp.Sci. student)

Project Summary:
An investigation is being conducted into the feasibility of implementing the DES and RC5 private-key data encryption algorithms in gate array form. Special attention is being devoted to the exploitation of inherent concurrency by way of hardware pipelining. Performance is assessed relative to software implementations on conventional computers. Finally space requirements are assessed in terms of the number of Xilinx devices needed to realize both designs.

Publication:
J. Electral & Electronics Engineering, Australia, 19(4), pp.201-211.