Instruction-Set Extension for Cryptographic Applications on Reconfigurable Platform

Recently, the area of reconfigurable computing has received considerable interest. Reconfigurable system is a specific name that is used for any machine that can be reconfigured during runtime to execute an algorithm as a hardware circuit. As a middle solution, reconfigurable systems stand halfway between traditional computing systems and specific hardware. This paper presents the mapping and performance analysis of two encryption algorithms, namely Rijndad and Twofish, on a coarse grain reconfigurable platform, namely MorphoSys. MorphoSys is a reconfigurable architecture targeted for multimedia applications. Since many cryptographic algorithms involve bitwise operations, bitwise instruction set extension was proposed to enhance the performance. The authors present the details of the mapping of the bitwise operations involved in the algorithms with thorough analysis. The methodology used can be utilized in other systems