A Fast Parameterized SHA3 Accelerator

ABSTRACT
Security is an extremely important feature in modern computer
systems. The fundamental basis of many security
problems, most notably authentication, is a secure hashing
algorithm. These algorithms take a message, return a
fixed size hash for the message, and require the following
important properties: ease of hash computation, inability of
generating the message from the hash, inability to change
the message and not the hash, and inability to have the same
hash for two different messages.
A family of these algorithms has been standardized by NIST
and given the name Secure Hashing Algorithm (SHA). The
newest of this family is SHA3, formerly known as Keccak,
and thus contains the most opportunity for design space
exploration. Since this hashing function will be frequently
used, requires many operations per input and is generally
inefficient on a general purpose CPU, it is an ideal function
to be implemented with a hardware accelerator to improve
performance (hashes/sec) and energy use (hashes/Watt). In
order to facilitate choosing a hashing accelerator for a particular
project, a parameterized implementation is developed
and explored using automated tools.

A Fast Parameterized SHA3 Accelerator