Hardware/software co-design of a dynamically configurable SHA-3 System-on-Chip (SoC)

In this paper, we present a novel design of a dynamically configurable hardware accelerator for the new NIST SHA-3 standard, namely the Keccak hashing function. The SHA-3 accelerator is composed of a static datapath built based on two different folded architectures of the Keccak function and controlled by a programmable Finite State Machine (FSM) that can be dynamically configured at run-time to hash a message of arbitrary size and digest length. The proposed hardware architectures enable implementing all functions and modes of operation supported by the Keccak SHA-3 hashing standard. Two prototypes of the accelerator are developed and validated on a Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA kit as a stand-alone system and on a ZedBoard kit featuring a ZynQ-7000 SoC FPGA, where the SHA-3 accelerator is implemented in the programmable logic and interfaced to an ARM Cortex-A9 processor. Hardware implementation is followed by a hardware/software co-design of a SHA-3 SoC running the keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC) and Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) security applications. The ARM processor runs the application software and offloads SHA-3 computations to the hardware accelerator. The implementation results illustrate the performance enhancement of the SHA-3 SoC over pure software implementations in addition to the unprecedented flexibility offered by the proposed accelerators.