By exploring symmetric cryptographic data level and instruction-level parallelism, the reconfigurable processor architecture for symmetric ciphers is presented based on Very-long instruction word (VLIW) structure. The application-specific instruction-set system for symmetric ciphers is proposed. As for the same arithmetic operation of symmetric ciphers, eleven kinds of reconfigurable cryptographic arithmetic units are designed by the reconfigurable technology. As to the requirement of high energy-efficient design, the loop buffer structure for instruction fetching unit is proposed to reduce the power consumption significantly with the same frequency as conventional, meanwhile, the chain processing mechanism is proposed to improve the cryptographic throughput without any area overhead. It has been fabricated with 0.18μm CMOS technology. The result shows that the processor can work up to 200MHz, and the fourteen kinds of cryptographic algorithms were mapped in the processor, the encryption throughput of AES, SNOW2.0 and SHA2 algorithm can achieve 1.19Gbps, 1.05Gbps, and 407Mbps respectively.