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.Anglai