VLSI Characterization of the Cryptographic Hash Function BLAKE
Cryptographic hash functions are used to protect information integrity and authenticity in a wide range of applications. After the discovery of weaknesses in the current deployed standards, the U.S. Institute of Standards and Technology started a public competition to develop the future standard SHA-3, which will be implemented in a multitude of environments, after its selection in 2012. In this paper, we investigate high-speed and low-area hardware architectures of one of the 14 "second-round" candidates in this competition: BLAKE. VLSI performance results of the proposed high-speed designs indicate a throughput improvement between 16% and 36% compared to the current standard SHA-2. Additionally, we propose a compact implementation of BLAKE with memory optimization that fits in 0.127 mm(2) of a 0.18 mu m CMOS. Measurements reveal a minimal power dissipation of 9.59 mu W/MHz at 0.65 V, which suggests that BLAKE is suitable for resource-limited systems.
cryptographic hash functions latch memory low-power sha-3 vlsi implementations