Speeded up and low-powered hardware implementation of the secure hash algorithm through partial unrolling
Journal
WSEAS Transactions on Computers
Date Issued
July 2005
Abstract
Applications that call for data integrity and signature authentication at electronic transactions invoke cryptographic primitives like hash functions. A hash function is utilized in the security layer of every communication protocol. However, as protocols evolve and new high-performance applications appear, the throughput of hash functions seems to reach to a limit. Market is asking for new implementations with higher throughputs respecting the tendency of the market to minimize devices' size and increase their autonomy to make them portable. 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 a partially unrolled implementation is presented that comes to exceed this limit improving the throughput by 53%. Power issues have also been taken in consideration, in such way that the proposed implementation can be characterized as low-power.