High-Speed FPGA Implementation of the SHA-1 Hash Function

• Published in: 2005 IEEE Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications pp. 211 - 215
• Main Authors: Kakarountas, A.P., Theodoridis, G., Laopoulos, T., Goutis, C.E.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-09-2005
• Subjects: Authentication; Conferences; Cryptography; Data acquisition; Data integrity and authentication; Data security; Field programmable gate arrays; FPGA implementation; Hash function; Mobile communication; Pipelines; Throughput; Very large scale integration; VLSI Design; Wireless application protocol
• ISBN: 9780780394452; 0780394453
• DOI: 10.1109/IDAACS.2005.282972

The main applications of the Hash functions lie in the fields of communication integrity and authentication. In every communication protocol, especially in mobile protocols, a Hash function is employed in the security layer. However, as communication protocols evolve and new high-performance applications appear, the throughput of hash functions seems to reach to a limit. Especially the SHA-1 Hash function, which is common in the majority of the wireless protocols (WAP etc.), was limited to a maximum throughput of 2 Gbps. In this paper, a new implementation is introduced to exceed this limit improving the throughput by 37% without significant area penalty.