Server side hashing core exceeding 3 Gbps of throughput

Abstract

Hash functions are forming a special family of cryptographic algorithms, which are applied wherever message integrity and authentication issues are critical. Implementations of these functions are cryptographic primitives to the most widely used cryptographic schemes and security protocols such as Secure Electronic Transactions (SET), Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), IPSec and Virtual Private Networks (VPN’s). As time passes it seems that all these applications call for higher throughput due to their rapid acceptance by the market especially to the corresponding servers of these applications. In this work a new technique is presented for increasing frequency and throughput of the currently most used hash function, which is SHA-1. This technique involves the application of spatial and temporal precomputation. Comparing to conventional pipelined implementations of hash functions the proposed technique leads to an implementation with more than 75% higher throughput. © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.