Design of networked reconfigurable encryption engine

The current state-of-the-art has given rise to many potential networked appliances that would be able to download new hardware services and upgrades and execute them locally. However this technology has not been widely used. This paper describes a user scenario of networked reconfiguration in encryption application using embedded software and reconfigurable hardware. The appliance´s hardware can be reconfigured at run-time, thus allowing to switch between several encryption standards and achieve hardware acceleration for each encryption standard. The reconfiguration bitstream is retrieved from the network, allowing future flexible scalability. A prototype has been built to demonstrate the functionality of the networked reconfigurable encryption engine.