SHA-2 Acceleration Meeting the Needs of Emerging Applications: A Comparative Survey

Abstract

While SHA-2 is a ubiquitous cryptographic hashing primitive, its role in emerging application domains, e.g. blockchains or trusted IoT components, has made the acceleration of SHA-2 very challenging due to new stringent classes of requirements, especially implementation cost and energy efficiency. The survey discusses these emerging applications and their fundamental requirements. Then, the work presents a comprehensive review of the different design techniques available in the literature for SHA-2 acceleration. The main focus of the presentation is placed on the impact of each design technique on the area, energy, power, and performance of the resulting accelerator, guiding the designer through the identification of the appropriate technique mixes which meet the constraints of any given application.

Acceleration of the Secure Hash Algorithm-256 (SHA-256) on an FPGA-CPU Cluster Using OpenCL

“…These works used a hardware description language (HDL) to implement the SHA-256 core and package it as an IP core [21]. Martino et al [22] survey acceleration techniques of SHA-2 at the architectural abstraction level and summarized their impact on logic area, energy, and power consumption. However, none of these works analyzed the use of a high level coding style such as OpenCL to generate an FPGA-based SHA-2 since the previously published optimization cannot be applied at the OpenCL-level.…”

EC-ElGamal and Genetic Algorithm-Based Enhancement for Lightweight Scalable Blockchain in IoT Domain

“…In [44] the authors discussed the relevance of EC based on the algebraic structure of a curve over a finite field in modern applications. In [45], the authors suggested that Secure Hash Algorithms (SHA) require optimization and a hybrid of multiple techniques based on the underlying application. A comparison of the SHA family of algorithm as displayed in Table 3 based on security standards reveals the functional, security level, and block size.…”

“…A comparison of the SHA family of algorithm as displayed in Table 3 based on security standards reveals the functional, security level, and block size. As derived from [45], the use of SHA in various application as displayed in Table 4 highlights the importance of SHA algorithms for use in IoT and blockchain. Note: Comparison taken from [45] In this section, a literature review of LSB, Blockchainbased IoT applications, traditional IoT security measures, lightweight blockchain, attacks on LSB, and a comparison study of EC and ElGamal with the RSA and SHA family is presented.…”

“…As derived from [45], the use of SHA in various application as displayed in Table 4 highlights the importance of SHA algorithms for use in IoT and blockchain. Note: Comparison taken from [45] In this section, a literature review of LSB, Blockchainbased IoT applications, traditional IoT security measures, lightweight blockchain, attacks on LSB, and a comparison study of EC and ElGamal with the RSA and SHA family is presented. The key conclusion is that blockchain's inherent Note: Based on survey from [45] features solve most IoT challenges; however, the limitations of generic blockchain create the need for lightweight blockchain.…”

“…Note: Comparison taken from [45] In this section, a literature review of LSB, Blockchainbased IoT applications, traditional IoT security measures, lightweight blockchain, attacks on LSB, and a comparison study of EC and ElGamal with the RSA and SHA family is presented. The key conclusion is that blockchain's inherent Note: Based on survey from [45] features solve most IoT challenges; however, the limitations of generic blockchain create the need for lightweight blockchain. Lightweight blockchain has been proposed by various researchers based on their respective challenges and focused areas of improvement.…”