turkmath.org

Hardware-accelerated computing has been successfully applied to various branches of science and engineering, resulting in unprecedented performance gains compared to conventional approaches. We apply it to cryptography, more specifically to the search of efficient constructions for the block cipher permutation layer, which is a computationally-hard problem that would take years even on super-computing clusters. We utilize FPGAs to accelerate the search of "hardware-efficient" 16x16 permutation matrices with "good" cryptographic properties. Our search engine is able to perform full spectrum search in fractions of time compared to conventional software-based approaches, leading to several novel permutation matrices with sought properties.