Design and optimized implementation of the SHA-2(256, 384, 512) hash algorithms

Coupled with the increasing demand for strong secure data transmission in communications, SHA-2 hash family is becoming the newest powerful hash function standard. In this paper, a reconfigurable architecture is proposed. The architecture supports a multi-mode operation in the sense that it performs all the three hash functions algorithms (256,384 and 512) of the SHA-2 standard. Furthermore, the performance of proposed implementation in the term of throughput and resources is higher than other hardware implementations, due to using critical data path optimization and the method of reducing word length. Therefore this work can substitute efficiently the existing MD5 and SHA-1 hash function implementations in every security scheme, also offers a higher security level strength.