AHCA: Agile Design Framework for Hashcat Acceleration Based on FPGA
Liming Deng, Guowei Zhu, Xitian Fan, Wei Cao, Xuegong Zhou, Fan Zhang, Shaobo Yang · ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems · 2025
This article presents AHCA, an agile design framework for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based Hashcat acceleration that automates the generation of optimized register transfer level (RTL) code. Our approach is centered on a proposed automated design method using a parameterized domain-specific template (DST) and a specific hardware operator library. The framework analyzes an algorithm’s graph to extract key hardware operators and their interconnection network. To support diverse user inputs, we introduce an innovative operator matching strategy using subgraph isomorphism, which maps algorithms to our operator library. This matched information, combined with design space exploration (DSE), is used to configure the DST and generate the final RTL code, avoiding redundancy for previously implemented algorithms. Compared to state-of-the-art high-level synthesis (HLS) tools, AHCA demonstrates a maximum performance enhancement of 797×, a Look-Up table (LUT) efficiency improvement of up to 105×, and an energy efficiency gain of up to 676×. When deployed on an FPGA for password cracking, the AHCA-generated hardware achieves a 63.95× enhancement in energy efficiency over CPUs and a 4.71× improvement over GPUs.