Information warfare: are you at risk?

Information warfare at its simplest level is the use of computers to attack an adversary's information infrastructure while protecting one's own information infrastructure. The significance of information warfare threats has been recognized by both the business and government sectors. However, some governments and organizations have resorted to industrial and economic espionage employing information warfare attacks to gain unfair advantages over competitors. When considering external information warfare attacks, it is important to note that terrorist organizations are now employing information warfare attacks as a means of both funding their activities and furthering their agendas.     

Who are you? How to protect against identity theft

Identity theft is the assumption of another person's financial identity through the use of the victim's identifying information. Identity theft has become one of the most lucrative criminal endeavors. Facilitated by the voluminous information available on the Internet to those who know where to look, the reported incidents of identity theft have grown at an unprecedented rate. Unfortunately, while the victims of identity theft may spend years attempting to clear their credit histories and criminal records, this crime is rarely prosecuted. While numerous laws have been enacted in an attempt by the United States government to address the issue of identity theft, the best protection available to consumers is constant vigilance.     

An instruction-level distributed processor for symmetric-key cryptography

Efficient implementation of block ciphers is critical toward achieving both high security and high-speed processing. Numerous block ciphers have been proposed and implemented, using a wide and varied range of functional operations. Existing architectures such as microcontrollers do not provide this broad range of support. Therefore, we will present a hardware architecture that achieves efficient block cipher implementation while maintaining flexibility through reconfiguration. In an effort to achieve such a hardware architecture, a study of a wide range of block ciphers was undertaken to develop an understanding of the functional requirements of each algorithm. This study led to the development of COBRA, a reconfigurable architecture for the efficient implementation of block ciphers. A detailed discussion of the top-level architecture, interconnection scheme, and underlying elements of the architecture will be provided. System configuration and on-the-fly reconfiguration will be analyzed, and from this analysis, it will be demonstrated that the COBRA architecture satisfies the requirements for achieving efficient implementation of a wide range of block ciphers that meet the 622 Mbps ATM network encryption throughput requirement.     

An FPGA-based performance evaluation of the AES block ciphercandidate algorithm finalists

The technical analysis used in determining which of the potential Advanced Encryption Standard candidates was selected as the Advanced Encryption Algorithm includes efficiency testing of both hardware and software implementations of candidate algorithms. Reprogrammable devices such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are highly attractive options for hardware implementations of encryption algorithms, as they provide cryptographic algorithm agility, physical security, and potentially much higher performance than software solutions. This contribution investigates the significance of FPGA implementations of the Advanced Encryption Standard candidate algorithms. Multiple architectural implementation options are explored for each algorithm. A strong focus is placed on high-throughput implementations, which are required to support security for current and future high bandwidth applications. Finally, the implementations of each algorithm will be compared in an effort to determine the most suitable candidate for hardware implementation within commercially available FPGAs