On FPGA-based implementations of Gröstl.
Bernhard Jungk, Steffen Reith · IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive · 2010
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has started a competition for a new secure hash standard. To make a significant comparison between the submitted candidates, third party implementations of all proposed hash functions are needed. This is one of the reasons why the SHA-3 candidate Grostl has been chosen for a FPGA-based implementation. Mainly our work is motivated by actual and future developments of the automotive market (e.g. car-2-car communication systems), which will increase the necessity for a suitable cryptographic infrastructure in modern vehicles (cf. AUTOSAR project) even further. One core component of such an infrastructure is a secure cryptographic hash function, which is used for a lot of applications like challenge-response authentication systems or digital signature schemes. Another motivation to evaluate Grostl is its resemblance to AES. The automotive market demands, like any mass market, low budget and therefore compact implementations, hence our evaluation of Grostl focuses on area optimizations. It is shown that, while Grostl is inherently quite large compared to AES, it is still possible to implement the Grostl algorithm on small and low budget FPGAs like the second smallest available Spartan-3, while maintaining a reasonable high throughput.