Cryptography is an important and vital application in security, defence, medical, business and many other application areas. The effective measure of a cryptosystem, is how long it can be used to encrypt and decrypt messages without the 'key' being broken. A class of cellular automata (CA) based encryption algorithms presents a particular promising approach to cryptography, since the initial state of the CA is the key to the encryption, evolving a complex chaotic system from this 'initial state' which cannot be predicted. However, software implementations of CA cryptography have the disadvantage that special purpose hardware canbe applied to break the code. Thus implementation in hardware is desirable to ensure that this evolutionary approach to computing is done in real time. This short paper has demonstrated CA cryptography can be implemented on a reconfigurable computing architecture (SPACE-2). The algorithm was described and verified in the Circal process algebra, and demonstrated on the reconfigurable computer.
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