SciEngines GmbH is a privately owned company. It has been founded late 2006 as a spin-off of the Universities of Bochum

Ruhr University

Ruhr University Bochum , located on the southern hills of central Ruhr area Bochum, was founded in 1962 as the first new public university in Germany since World War II...

 and Kiel

University of Kiel

The University of Kiel is a university in the city of Kiel, Germany. It was founded in 1665 as the Academia Holsatorum Chiloniensis by Christian Albert, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and has approximately 23,000 students today...

, both in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. The company has been formed out of the team of the original COPACOBANA project. The project intended to create a platform for an affordable Custom hardware attack

Custom hardware attack

In cryptography, a custom hardware attack uses specifically designed application-specific integrated circuits to decipher encrypted messages....

. COPACOBANA is a computer can be utilized to perform a so called Brute force attack

Brute force attack

In cryptography, a brute-force attack, or exhaustive key search, is a strategy that can, in theory, be used against any encrypted data. Such an attack might be utilized when it is not possible to take advantage of other weaknesses in an encryption system that would make the task easier...

 to recover DES encrypted data. It consists of 120 commercially available, reconfigurable integrated circuits (FPGAs). These Xilinx

Xilinx

Xilinx, Inc. is a supplier of programmable logic devices. It is known for inventing the field programmable gate array and as the first semiconductor company with a fabless manufacturing model....

 Spartan3-1000 run in parallel, and create a massively parallel system. Since 2007, SciEngines GmbH has enhanced and developed successors of COPACOBANA. Furthermore the COPACOBANA has become a well known reference platform for cryptanalysis and custom hardware

Custom hardware attack

In cryptography, a custom hardware attack uses specifically designed application-specific integrated circuits to decipher encrypted messages....

 based attacks to symmetric, asymmetric cyphers and stream ciphers. 2008 attacks against A5/1 stream cipher

Stream cipher

In cryptography, a stream cipher is a symmetric key cipher where plaintext digits are combined with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream . In a stream cipher the plaintext digits are encrypted one at a time, and the transformation of successive digits varies during the encryption...

 an encryption system been used to encrypt voice streams in GSM have been published as the first known real world attack utilizing off-the-shelf custom hardware.

They introduced in 2008 their RIVYERA S3-5000 enhancing the performance of the computer dramatically via using 128 Spartan-3 5000's. Currently SciEngines RIVYERA holds the record in brute-force breaking DES utilizing 128 Spartan-3 5000 FPGAs.

2009 they introduced RIVYERA S6-LX150 providing a 128 GByte of shared memory

Shared memory

In computing, shared memory is memory that may be simultaneously accessed by multiple programs with an intent to provide communication among them or avoid redundant copies. Depending on context, programs may run on a single processor or on multiple separate processors...

 accessible for all 128 FPGAs.

2010 the first release of Xilinx Virtex-6 LX550T FPGA based modes has been demonstrated recovering e.g. AES, SHA ciphers and HPC applications.

Providing a standard off-the-shelf Intel CPU and mainboard integraded into the FPGA computer RIVYERA systems allow to execute most standard code without modifications. SciEngines aims that programmers only have to focus on porting the most time consuming 5% of their code to the FPGA. Therefore they bundle a Eclipse

Eclipse (software)

Eclipse is a multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment and an extensible plug-in system...

 like development environment which allows code implementation in hardware based implementation languages e.g. VHDL, Verilog

Verilog

In the semiconductor and electronic design industry, Verilog is a hardware description language used to model electronic systems. Verilog HDL, not to be confused with VHDL , is most commonly used in the design, verification, and implementation of digital logic chips at the register-transfer level...

 as well as in C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 based languages. An Application Programming Interface

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

 in C, C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 and Fortran

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

allow scientists and programmers to adopt their code to benefit form an application-specific hardware architecture.