DES Benchmark

        Directory Contents

        The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is a system developed for the U.S. government for use by the general public. The DES algorithm, a combination of substitution and permutation, derives its strength from repeated application of these two techniques, one on top of the other, for a total of 16 cycles. The software algorithm used in this benchmark was adopted from Eric Young's fast encryption package. It performs rotation to align bits for simpler permutation. As a result, this version of encryption requires only 42 operations per substitution and permutation cycle. In contrast, the RAW implementation takes advantage of the independence between each DES encryption and decryption operation. It performs n encryptions or n decryptions simultaneously, where n is the number of hardware DES modules in the design. For each encryption, we use a lookup table to bypass the shifting and substitution operations. As a result, an individual hardware DES module is expected to achieve performance similar to the best software solution and thus achieve an O(n) speedup.