Design and Implementation of a Fully Pipelined and Parameterizable Hardware Accelerator for BLAKE2 Cryptographic Hash Function in FPGA

Cryptographic hash functions play a pivotal role in ensuring the security and integrity of data in various applications such as online banking, secure communications, and digital signatures. The Blake2b hash function is a widely used cryptographic hash function known for its security and efficiency. However, its implementation can be computationally intensive, especially for large inputs. In this project, the design and implementation of a fully pipelined Blake2b accelerator on an FPGA using Vivado Design Suite is presented. The primary goal of this work is to create a highly effective hardware accelerator to enhance the performance of the Blake2b hash function. A fully pipe lined accelerator that can process multiple input blocks simultaneously, reducing the overall latency of the implementation has been developed. The design was implemented on FPGA using Vivado Design Suite, which is a powerful FPGA design and verification tool. The fully pipelined design achieved a significant reduction in delay compared to the software implementation, demonstrating the effectiveness of the pipeline architecture. In conclusion, this project demonstrates the importance of performance improvement of cryptographic hash functions such as the Blake2b hash function. The proposed fully pipelined accelerator improves the performance of the Blake2b hash function while keeping the level of security high. The pipeline architecture offers a straightforward and effective way to accelerate the computation of cryptographic hash functions on an FPGA.