Optimizing SHA-1 hash function for high throughput with a partial unrolling study

Abstract

Hash functions are widely used in applications that call for data integrity and signature authentication at electronic transactions. A hash function is utilized in the security layer of every communication protocol. As time passes more sophisticated applications arise that address to more users-clients and thus demand for higher throughput. Furthermore, due to the tendency of the market to minimize devices' size and increase their autonomy to make them portable, power issues have also to be considered. The existing SHA-1 Hash Function implementations (SHA-1 is common in many protocols e.g. IPSec) limit throughput to a maximum of 2 Gbps. In this paper, a new implementation comes to exceed this limit improving the throughput by 53%. Furthermore,power dissipation is kept low compared to previous works, in such way that the proposed implementation can be characterized as low-power. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.