Parallel cryptographic hashing: Developments in the last 25 years
Neha Kishore, Priya Raina · Cryptologia · 2019
Parallel computing has led to fundamental changes in almost all research areas associated with computer science; cryptography is no exception. Besides improved speed and resource utilization, parallel cryptography is also promising from the security point of view. In particular, cryptographic hash functions (CHFs) – “the swiss knife” of the cryptography toolkit – stand to gain a lot from parallelism. Consequently, there has been an increasing interest in research towards the development of parallel CHFs for faster, more secure and more efficient hashing, particularly since the competition for the SHA-3 standard. This paper attempts to consolidate the research efforts in the field of parallel hashing, exploring various approaches in this direction. Within each approach discussed in the article, CHFs have been classified on the basis of construction and their design, implementation and performance have been explained, with the primary focus on parallelism. Finally, a broad temporal overview of the developments in the field of parallel hashing has been presented.