A NOVEL APPROACH FOR IMPLEMENTING RC4 STREAM CIPHER ALGORITHM

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Egyptian Armed Forces.

Abstract

The implementation of cryptographic algorithms on reconfigurable hardware devices based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) devices is highly attractive. They can run faster than software implementations while preserving the physical security of hardware solutions. Meanwhile, they maintain the flexibility obtained by using those software solutions [1]. In this work, a proposed hardware implementation of RC4 algorithm on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is introduced. The design was described using the hardware description language VHDL (Very high speed integrated circuit hardware description language). The design was implemented on devices from XILINX and we achieved speeds of up to 280 Mbits/s.

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