Hardware Implementation of four byte per clock RC4 algorithm

TL;DR

This paper presents six innovative hardware architectures for RC4 encryption, achieving higher throughput by processing up to four bytes per clock, and demonstrates their implementation on FPGA boards with Ethernet communication.

Contribution

The paper introduces six novel RC4 hardware designs that significantly improve throughput and resource efficiency compared to existing implementations.

Findings

Design 6 processes 4 bytes per clock.

Higher throughput with reduced power and resource usage.

Successful FPGA implementation with Ethernet communication.

Abstract

In the field of cryptography till date the 2-byte in 1-clock is the best known RC4 hardware design [1], while 1-byte in 1-clock [2], and the 1-byte in 3 clocks [3][4] are the best known implementation. The design algorithm in[2] considers two consecutive bytes together and processes them in 2 clocks. The design [1] is a pipelining architecture of [2]. The design of 1-byte in 3-clocks is too much modular and clock hungry. In this paper considering the RC4 algorithm, as it is, a simpler RC4 hardware design providing higher throughput is proposed in which 6 different architecture has been proposed. In design 1, 1-byte is processed in 1-clock, design 2 is a dynamic KSA-PRGA architecture of Design 1. Design 3 can process 2 byte in a single clock, where as Design 4 is Dynamic KSA-PRGA architecture of Design 3. Design 5 and Design 6 are parallelization architecture design 2 and design 4 which can compute 4 byte in a single clock. The maturity in terms of throughput, power consumption and resource usage, has been achieved from design 1 to design 6. The RC4 encryption and decryption designs are respectively embedded on two FPGA boards as co-processor hardware, the communication between the two boards performed using Ethernet.