Students Develop Open Crypto Chip

kris writes "German Computer Magazine c't just pointed to an article about German Students developing a crypto chip. The device will do 168 MBit/sec DES, 50 key exchanges in 768 bit RSA and will the VHDL will be published as Open Source. Alcatel will build the beast." The original article is in German, but kris also sent us a rough translation which I've attached below.

Stuttgart students develop crypto chip

The eight head team "pg99" at the computer science dept of stuttgart university under guidance from Dipl-Ing Gundolf Kiefer has developed a complete crypto chip, which can do RSA (768 bit) and DES. With DES, with is intended for large data volumes, the chip can to 168 MBit/sec. The higher level RSA is being used mainly for DES key exchange, for authentication and for digital signatures. The chip will to ~50 keys/sec in RSA. Communication with the environment can be done via a parallel interface (8, 16 or 32 bit) or via two-wire I2C bis, which can be found on many current motherboards (Intel calls this SMB).

The 100,000 gate chip will be produced by Alcatel in 0.35 m technology (compare this to the 134,000 gates in an 80286). Officially the chip will be unveiled at the 8th of July at the computer science faculty, where the VHDL source of the design will be made availabe as Open Source.

Comments

The natural question (and likely answer)

[Mr Z]

The natural question for many /.'ers that also participate in distributed.net is whether or not this will be useful for crunching keys.

I'm guessing, in it's base form, the device is tuned for (en|de)crypting large volumes of data with a fixed key, and that key reloads are expensive. Translation: It won't help a d.net-style keysearching effort much as-is.

Does anyone have more information on this to confirm or deny this conjecture?

Also, is anyone out there crazy enough (and skilled enough w/ VHDL) to hack this device into the world's fastest RC5 block cruncher? :-) Places like MOSIS will fab "educational" and "prototype" designs in small quantities for reasonable prices.

--Joe

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