Optimized algorithms and architectures for fast non-cryptographic hash functions in hardware

Abstract

The design and implementation of eight novel non-cryptographic hash functions is proposed in this paper. Those can suitably be employed in networking and security applications that require fast lookup and/or counting architectures. Our approach is inspired by the design of the existing non-cryptographic hash function Xoodoo-NC, which is constructed through the concatenation of several Xoodoo permutations. In a similar way, this work concatenates several rounds of symmetric-key ciphers to construct non-cryptographic hash functions. The goal is to achieve high performance while maintaining the avalanche properties. Meeting the avalanche criteria is necessary to yield a significant change in the output of hash functions even for the slightest change in the input. The number of rounds required to achieve satisfactory avalanche scores for each cipher is simulated. We implement the corresponding non-cryptographic hash functions on an FPGA and we synthesize them on ASIC to evaluate the occupied resources and the performance. This paper evaluates the performance and area of ASIC implementations optimized for high operating speed. This evaluation is done on the 65 nm TSMC technology. One of the proposed non-cryptographic hash functions, namely PHOTON-NC, outperforms all previously proposed non-cryptographic hash functions in terms of throughput and latency on FPGA, in exchange for an acceptable increase in FPGA resources, while Xoodoo-NC proves to have the highest performance on ASIC.