Design and Analysis of Secure One-way Functions for the Protection of Symmetric Key Cryptosystems
Surbhi Chhabra, Vishakha Dhanwani, Vikas Kumar Dhaka, Kusum Lata · 2020
Security is a major concern for internet users and industries when it comes to data processing, message transmission, electronic transaction etc. One important feature of secure communication is modern cryptography. It allows the implementation of major cryptographic objectives: confidentiality, authentication, data integrity and non-repudiation. Most NIST-recommended crypto algorithms are highly reliable, faster and powerful, but are still susceptible to attacks such as brute-force attack, algebraic attacks, linear attacks, etc. Hash functions are the most widespread primitives of cryptography that are widely used in information security applications. The main objective of this paper is to design the hardware Intellectual Property (IP) core of the secured one-way hash functions (SHA-256 and MD5) and analyze the fully pipelined optimized hardware architecture. The key feature of this improved implementation is to generate a secure and unique key for the protection of symmetric key crypto algorithms. The proposed work is implemented at high-level language C and converted into Register Transfer Level (RTL) IP using the Xilinx Vivado HLS on ZedBoard. The robustness and randomness of the algorithm are evaluated in the form of the Hamming Distance and Avalanche Effect. The results show that the proposed design offers a higher level of security and implementation flexibility with small design overhead and low power consumption. The resulting SHA-256 architecture operates at 127.22MHz with a throughput of 15Gbps, while MD5 architecture operates at 123MHz with a throughput of 15Gbps.