Comprehensive Comparison of Hardware Performance of Fourteen Round 2 SHA-3 Candidates with 512-bit Outputs Using Field Programmable Gate Arrays

In this paper, we extend our evaluation of the hardware performance of 14 Round 2 SHA-3 candidates, presented at CHES 2010, to the case of high security variants, with 512 bit outputs. A straightforward method for predicting the performance of 512-bit variants, based on the results for 256-bit versions of investigated hash functions is presented, and confirmed experimentally. The VHDL codes for 512-bit variants of all 14 SHA-3 Round 2 candidates and the old standard SHA-2 have been developed and thoroughly verified. These codes have been then used to evaluate the relative performance of all aforementioned algorithms using seven modern families of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) from two major vendors, Xilinx and Altera. The results point to very significant differences among all evaluated algorithms in terms of both throughput and area. Only two candidates, Keccak and CubeHash, outperform SHA-512 in terms of the primary optimization target used in this study, throughput to area ratio.