Hardware acceleration design of the SHA-3 for high throughput and low area on FPGA

Abstract

AbstractIn sensitive communications, the cryptographic hash function plays a crucial role, including in the military, healthcare, and banking, ensuring secure transmission by verifying data integrity and carrying out other vital tasks. Compared to other cryptographic hash algorithms, such as SHA-1 and SHA-2, the Keccak hash function (SHA-3) boasts superior hardware performance and is more resilient to modern cryptanalysis techniques. Nonetheless, hardware performance enhancements, such as boosting speed or reducing area usage, are constantly required. This research focuses on increasing the Keccak hash algorithm’s throughput rate by introducing a novel architecture that reduces the total number of clock cycles required to obtain the result of a hash function. Additionally, the new simplified structure of the round constant (RC) generator design assures a reasonably low area and achieves the highest throughput and efficiency. Thus, when implemented, it achieved the highest throughput of 19.515 Gbps, 24.428 Gbps, 33.393 Gbps, and 36.358 Gbps on FPGA devices with the Virtex-5, Artix-7, Virtex-6, and Virtex-7, respectively. Finally, our approach is compared to recently published designs.