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.