Compact FPGA implementations of the five SHA-3 finalists

Abstract

Allowing good performances on different platforms is an important criteria for the selection of the future sha-3 standard. In this paper, we consider the compact implementations of blake, Grøstl, jh, Keccak and Skein on recent fpga devices. Our results bring an interesting complement to existing analyzes, as most previous works on fpga implementations of the sha-3 candidates were optimized for high throughput applications. Following recent guidelines for the fair comparison of hardware architectures, we put forward clear trends for the selection of the future standard. First, compact fpga implementations of Keccak are less efficient than their high throughput counterparts. Second, Grøstl shows interesting performances in this setting, in particular in terms of throughput over area ratio. Third, the remaining candidates are comparably suitable for compact fpga implementations, with some slight contrasts (in area cost and throughput). © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.