High-Speed FPGA Implementation of the SHA-1 Hash Function

This paper presents a high-speed SHA-1 implementation. Unlike the conventional unfolding transformation, the proposed unfolding transformation technique makes the combined hash operation blocks to have almost the same delay overhead regardless of the unfolding factor. It can achieve high throughput of SHA-1 implementation by avoiding the performance degradation caused by the first hash computation. We demonstrate the proposed SHA-1 architecture on a FPGA chip. From the experimental results, the SHA-1 architecture with unfolding factor 5 shows 1.17Gbps. The proposed SHA-1 architecture can achieve about 31% performance improvements compared to its counterparts. Thus, the proposed SHA-1 can be applicable for the security of the high-speed but compact mobile appliances.