Networking Data Integrity: High Speed Architectures and Hardware Implementations

Hash functions are widely used in encryption schemes and security layers of communication protocols (wap, ipsec) for data integrity, digital signature and message authentication codes. In addition to the demanded high security level, the need for high performance is a major factor of the security implementations. In this work, an ultra high speed architecture for the hardware implementation of both md5 and sha-1 is proposed. Both hash functions have been developed with vhdl description language and have been integrated in fpga devices. The introduced md5 implementation performance is equal to 2,1 gbps while sha-1 proposed implementation achieves throughput equal to 2,3 gbps. Both proposed implementations are compared in throughput, operating frequency and in the area-delay product, with other related works. From these comparisons, it is proven that the md5 proposed implementation is better by a factor range from 700% to 1500%. The sha-1 proposed implementation is better by about 800% to 1700% in the term of performance, compared with the other conventional works.