On Solving RC5 Challenges with FPGAs

This work explores a hardware design alternative and a cost assessment of an FPGA-based brute force attack against the challenge RC5-72. The aim is to develop an alternative to software-based solutions for distributed.net. Hardware platforms, particularly reconfigurable hardware, can offer significant cost, flexibility and performance advantages, while significantly reducing environmental energy costs and impacts. Implementation results show that an 80 US$ FPGA can yield a throughput of 145 Mkeys/sec with a power consumption of 10 Watts. This is roughly an order of magnitude faster, cheaper and lower power, when compared with fully dedicated general purpose computers.