Stratix IV visits Fort Meade

posted by Loring Wirbel on 11/05/2009   |   comments 6

You knew, didn’t you, that when we began writing about the predominant role FPGAs were playing in crypto, they’d be showing up post haste at the doors of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md. Well, Altera Corp.’s Stratix IV is there, courtesy of a KG-530 Sonet encryptor built by General Dynamics’ C4 Systems division.  (The original version of this story listed Cyclone IV, which made less sense, as Andy points out below, and was the result of a GCN transposition rather than a GD mistake - Altera corrected this one for us.)

William Jackson of Government Computer News provided the scoop on the contract award, saying that reprogrammability was key in allowing support of multiple encryption algorithms. NSA recommends to commercial operations that they use Advanced Encryption Standard, the follow-on to DES that is the mainstream encryption option. But for government agencies, NSA wants a variety of private-key and public-key options to choose from.

GD’s C4 group had a long history of working with NSA on different communication protocols – the Fastlane Asynchronous Transfer Mode encryptor was based on ASICs, while a series of IP-based Taclane encryptors used both ASICs and Xilinx FGPAs.

The key spec to meet for the KG-530, according to a General Dynamics executive, was being able to meet 40-Gbit/sec network speeds today, while being able to scale to 100 Gbits/sec in the future. Note that this is not raw packet speed, but encrypted traffic speeds. It’s odd that NSA and military agencies still rely on Sonet as a protocol, but then again, the government is still using ATM protocols in the Fastlane systems!

So there you have it. ASICs get displaced in commercial crypto accounts, and finally in government systems at Puzzle Palace headquarters. Another domino falls in FPGAs’ plans to dominate programmable worlds.

 

Reader Comments

at 11/5/2009 2:42:44 PM, desert rat said:
Finally, you have abandoned those lame, boring, mundane, pedestrian, fantasy FPGA applications in telecom and come up with something really interesting to talk about. If I had to read another word about ridiculous telecom FPGA apps here, I was going to write you a snarky reply. Wait until you see the MIL guys pushing 10G of data on 80 independent channels of a fat-pipe across a VPX backplane from multiple FPGA-based processing nodes. That should knock your socks off. BTW, that's 10G of data on EACH of those 80 fat-pipe channels, and not some multiplexed smoke-and-mirrors 20% efficient over-hyped outright-lie telecom number.



at 11/5/2009 5:59:38 PM, jmoore said:
Two items:

1) This was not Cyclone-IV, it was Stratix-IV.
2) FPGA use in crypto is not new. FPGA use in crypto has been around a long time. How the FPGAs were being used differently was pioneered by Xilinx (notice date March 2007): Go to www.mil-embedded.com/articles/id/?2069




at 11/6/2009 1:52:55 PM, Loring said:
jmoore, the GCN article and GD release specifically mentioned that the company awaited early sampling of the Cyclone IV. Check links above. I'd like to know if that was wrong.

You're right, FPGAs in crypto certainly have been around a while.



at 11/6/2009 2:37:57 PM, jmoore said:
I believe the press release is in error. The information I have been told is that it was the very high rate transceivers that GD was needing. Makes sense based on the KG-530 data rates required.



at 11/6/2009 4:03:54 PM, Loring said:
I'll go probe this, thanks for the tip.




at 11/9/2009 1:33:02 PM, Andy T said:
I'm with jmoore on the speculation that it's a PR typo. This smells like the Stratix IV GT, as it was sampling as Engineering Silicon back in February/March and Cyclone IV has just been announced and it is designed for 40G and 100G datapaths, whereas Cyclone IV is more of a PCIe play/Stratix II GX killer.

Crypto in an SDR, maybe, but I doubt it's at SONET OC768 (the military uses standard telco infrastructure as much as possible, so I'm surprised at your seeming surprise about SONET being used, Loring)

Besides, I doubt the fabric in the Cyclone can handle a 40Gbps datapath and memory bandwidth unless there are a slug of them on a board - even then it would be extremely unwieldy, which is why we came up with the Stratix IV GT in the first place.

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