Optimization of a Quantum-Secure Sponge-Based Hash Message Authentication Protocol

Hash message authentication is a fundamental building block of many networking security protocols such as SSL, TLS, FTP, and even HTTPS. The sponge-based SHA-3 hashing algorithm is the most recently developed hashing function as a result of a NIST competition to find a new hashing standard after SHA-1 and SHA-2 were found to have collisions, and thus were considered broken. We used Xilinx High-Level Synthesis to develop an optimized and pipelined version of the post-quantum-secure SHA-3 hash message authentication code (HMAC) which is capable of computing a HMAC every 280 clock-cycles with an overall throughput of 604 Mbps. We cover the general security of sponge functions in both a classical and quantum computing standpoint for hash functions, and offer a general architecture for HMAC computation when sponge functions are used.