Novel hardware implementation for generating message authentication codes

Abstract

HMAC mechanism rely his security in the underlying hash function. This mechanism is used for authentication codes between two parties that share a secret key in order to authenticate information transmitted between these parties. Currently used HMAC implementations utilize MD-5 or SHA-1 hash functions that both have now been proved to be vulnerable. This affects the security level provided by the HMAC mechanism and thus in the near future a more secure hash function will be used. One of them is the SHA-256 hash function which is used the HMAC implementation presented in this paper. The proposed hardware implementation, invokes a partially unrolled implementation for the underlying hash function leading to a high-throughput and low-power implementation for the whole HMAC construction.