Hardware implementation analysis of SHA-256 and SHA-512 algorithms on FPGAs

Abstract

Hash functions are common and important cryptographic primitives, which are very critical for data integrity assurance and data origin authentication security services. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) being reconfigurable, flexible and physically secure are a natural choice for implementation of hash functions in a broad range of applications with different area-performance requirements. In this paper, we explore alternative architectures for the implementation of hash algorithms of the secure hash standards SHA-256 and SHA-512 on FPGAs and study their area-performance trade-offs. As several 64-bit adders are needed in SHA-512 hash value computation, new architectures proposed in this paper implement modulo-64 addition as modulo-32, modulo-16 and modulo-8 additions with a view to reduce the chip area. Hash function SHA-512 is implemented in different FPGA families of ALTERA to compare their performance metrics such as area, memory, latency, clocking frequency and throughput to guide a designer to select the most suitable FPGA for an application. In addition, a common architecture is designed for implementing SHA-256 and SHA-512 algorithms.