Paper 2010/260

On FPGA-based implementations of Gr\{o}stl

Bernhard Jungk and Steffen Reith

Abstract

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 Gr\{o}stl 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 Gr\{o}stl is its resemblance to AES. The automotive market demands, like any mass market, low budget and therefore compact implementations, hence our evaluation of Gr\{o}stl focuses on area optimizations. It is shown that, while Gr\{o}stl is inherently quite large compared to AES, it is still possible to implement the Gr\{o}stl algorithm on small and low budget FPGAs like the second smallest available Spartan-3, while maintaining a reasonable high throughput.