Efficient hashing using the AES instruction set

Abstract

In this work, we provide a software benchmark for a large range of 256-bit blockcipher-based hash functions. We instantiate the underlying blockcipher with AES, which allows us to exploit the recent AES instruction set (AES-NI). Since AES itself only outputs 128 bits, we consider double-block-length constructions, as well as (single-block-length) constructions based on Rijndael-256. Although we primarily target architectures supporting AES-NI, our framework has much broader applications by estimating the performance of these hash functions on any (micro-)architecture given AES-benchmark results. As far as we are aware, this is the first comprehensive performance comparison of multi-block-length hash functions in software. © 2011 International Association for Cryptologic Research.