Improving SHA-2 Hardware Implementations

This paper proposes a set of new techniques to improve the implementation of the SHA-2 hashing algorithm. These techniques consist mostly in operation rescheduling and hardware reutilization, allowing a significant reduction of the critical path while the required area also decreases. Both SHA256 and SHA512 hash functions have been implemented and tested in the VIRTEX II Pro prototyping technology. Experimental results suggest improvements to related SHA256 art above 50% when compared with commercial cores and 100% to academia art, and above 70% for the SHA512 hash function. The resulting cores are capable of achieving the same throughput as the fastest unrolled architectures with 25% less area occupation than the smallest proposed architectures. The proposed cores achieve a throughput of 1.4 Gbit/s and 1.8 Gbit/s with a slice requirement of 755 and 1667 for SHA256 and SHA512 respectively, on a XC2VP30-7 FPGA.