The Encryption and Decryption With the growth of the information age has come a strong need to safeguard confidential or copyrighted digital information.

The satellite and cable industries have developed proprietary schemes,

and set-top box architectures have been develope to allow multiple decryption schemes to exist on the same box. Without encryption there would be no business model for PAY-TV,

and material could be easily copied.

 

Cryptography basics: What is Encryption and Decryption 

While analog signals enable tapes and broadcast transmissions to be copy,

the copies were always of inferior quality and could not be recopy without significant degradation.

Digital copying without protection would provide copies of equal quality to the original,

thereby jeopardizing the legal rights of performers and media organizations.

As well as proprietary schemes there are a number of standards that have been develop to protect media content, for example:

the DVD regional coding scheme.

Some schemes are more secure than others, and there is also a demand by many to protect data in a number of DVT segments,

especially those segments based around IP networks.

DES / Triple DES

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) and its variant Triple -DES (TDES) has been adopt by the U.S. government as the federal standard for the encryption of commercial and sensitive-but-unclassified information.

Using a Spartan-IIE FPGA and the Xilinx DES/TDES core provides low-cost data encryption solutions for use in a wide variety of applications such as secure Internet solutions, electronic financial transactions, remote access servers, cable modems, secure video surveillance, encrypted data storage etc.

Rijndael – AES

The latest scheme adopt by the NIST for their Advance Encryption Standard is call Rijndael. The selection confirms in mid-2001 and it expect that Rijndael-AES will supersede DES and Triple-DES over time.

Xilinx have a number of different core solutions available, aimed both at fast throughput or compact area. All the cores, can fit in the latest Spartan-IIE device families, and are simple to incorporate into customer’s designs.

Xilinx Solution

The Xilinx’s Spartan-IIE programmable logic solutions offer the flexibility to build products that can be reprogrammed in the field at costs far below any other programmable solution. FPGAs traditionally accelerate our customer’s time-to-market, increased time-in-market and provide rapid product proliferation in this market.

In a wide range of encryption and decryption applications Xilinx Spartan-IIE FPGAs can provide extremely cost effective hardware solutions.