Fast Flexible Architectures for Secure Communication

The growth of the Internet as a vehicle for secure communication and electronic commerce has brought cryptographic processing performance to the forefront of high throughput system design. Cryptography provides the mechanisms necessary to implement accountability, accuracy, and confidentiality in communication. This trend will be further underscored with the widespread adoption of secure protocols such as secure IP (IPSEC) and virtual private networks (VPNs). Efficient cryptographic processing, therefore, will become increasingly vital to good system performance.In this book, we explore hardware/software-design techniques to improve the performance of secret-key cipher algorithms. We introduce new instructions that improve the efficiency of the analyzed algorithms, and further introduce the Crypto Maniac processor, a fast and flexible co-processor for cryptographic workloads.Our first approach is to add instruction set support for fast substitutions, general permutations, rotates, and modular arithmetic. Our analyses of the original and optimized algorithms suggest future directions for the design of high-performance programmable cryptographic processors.