The objective of this course is to build knowledge and skills necessary for efficient implementations of cryptographic primitives on reconfigurable hardware. The implementation platform will be a field programmable gate array (FPGA) containing a general purpose processor and additional reconfigurable fabric for implementations of custom hardware accelerators. In the studio format, team projects require design of selected cryptographic primitives followed by comparison and contrast of various implementation alternatives, such as software, custom FPGA hardware, and hybrid hardware-software co-design. Project teams are ideally composed of one Computer Engineering student and one Software Engineering or Computer Science student. Computer Engineering students lead the hardware design portions of each project, and Software Engineering and Computer Science students lead the software development portions. Topics may include binary finite field arithmetic, block ciphers, hash functions, counter mode of operation for block ciphers, public key cryptosystems, hardware/software co-design methodologies with FPGAs, software development and profiling, high level synthesis, on-chip buses, hardware/software interfaces, custom hardware accelerators and side channel attacks.

This course provides an introduction to cryptography, its mathematical foundations, and its relation to security. It covers classical cryptosystems, private-key cryptosystems (including DES and AES), hashing and public-key cryptosystems (including RSA). The course also provides an introduction to data integrity and authentication. Students cannot take and receive credit for this course if they have credit for CSCI-662.