High Speed FPGA Implementation of Cryptographic KECCAK Hash Function Crypto-Processor

Abstract

Cryptographic hash functions are at the heart of many information security applications like message authentication codes (MACs), digital signatures and other forms of authentication. One of the methods to ensure information integrity is the use of hash functions, which generates a stream of bytes (hash) that must be unique. But most functions can no longer prevent malicious attacks and ensure that the information have just a hash. Because of the weakening of the widely used SHA-1 hash algorithm and concerns over the similarly-structured algorithms of the SHA-2 family, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has initiated the SHA-3 contest in order to select a suitable drop-in replacement. KECCAK hash function has been submitted to SHA-3 competition and it belongs to the final five candidate functions. In this paper, we present the implementation details of the hash function’s KECCAK algorithm, moreover, the proposed KECCAK design has been implemented on XILINX FPGAs. Its area, frequency, throughput and efficiency have been derived and compared and it is shown that the proposed design allows a trade-off between the maximum frequency and the area implementation.