Design of Cryptographic Hardware Module Using FPGA

Abstract

Cryptography has numerous applications in today's world, the most prevalent one being transferring messages safely over the network. Cryptography algorithms are either implemented in software on a general-purpose processor or in hardware on an application specific integrated circuit While the software implementations tend to be time and cost consuming, the hardware implementation is one of the methods to overcome these problems. This project is proposed to design hardware security module on the field programmable gate array. This project utilized Twofish algorithm with 128-bit key length and will be implemented using Altera FPGA trainer board. Also the whole features of the algorithm will be examined, particularly sub-key generation, encryption and decryption processes. The implementation of FPGA technology will increase the processing speed of cryptographic process as well as reducing the production cost. This project consists of FPGA devices as the main crypto-processor and memory chip as its database unit. The design will be tested for its quality of performance through experiments with multiple types of data.