Brute Forced AES Key Cracking using a FPGA

Side-channel analysis often comes up with a list of ranked bytes for each byte in the key. The issue is to figure out which one is the actual key in use by the network.

This project builds a high-speed cracker to create & test these keys. While software AES has good speed, especially using something like the AES-NI hardware acceleration in Intel micros, it is slowed down by the fact you need to do a lot of “other” work. Such as sorting the list of bytes, permeating them to create keys, comparing results, etc. Doing it all in hardware runs the whole system at a pretty fast speed.

This project includes both HW & SW, in fact there is a SW-only cracker too. Both HW & SW is kept on the AESExplorer - Brute Force AES Search page.