Solving RC5 Challenges with Hardware - a Distributed.net Perspective

Encryption is the basic means to enforce confidentiality in digital communications. This work explores a hardware design alternative and a cost assessment of an FPGA-based brute force attack against RSA Secret-Key Challenge RC5-72. The aim is to develop an alternative to software-based solutions for distributed. net. Implementation results show that an 80 US FPGA can yield a throughput of 145 Mkeys/sec with a power consumption of 10 Watts. This is roughly an order of magnitude faster, cheaper and lower power, when compared with fully dedicated general purpose computers.