Quasi-Pipelined Hash Circuits

Hash functions are an important cryptographic primitive. They are used to obtain a fixed-size fingerprint, or hash value, of an arbitrary long message. We focus particularly on the class of dedicated hash functions, whose general construction is presented; the peculiar arrangement of sequential and combinational units makes the application of pipelining techniques to these constructions not trivial. We formalize here an optimization technique called quasipipelining, whose goal is to optimize the critical path and thus to increase the clock frequency in dedicated hardware implementations. The SHA-2 algorithm has been previously examined by Dadda et al., with specific versions of quasipipelining; here, a full generalization of the technique is presented, along with application to the SHA-1 algorithm. Quasi-pipelining could be as well applied to future hashing algorithms, provided they are designed along the same lines as those of the SHA family.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ARITH
• Authors: Marco Macchetti, Luigi Dadda
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Arbitrary Long Message, ARITH 2005, Dedicated Hash Functions, Hash Functions