A reconfigurable and ultra low-cost VLSI implementation of SHA-1 and MD5 functions

The hash functions are applied in the communication integrity and signature authentication. There are so many secure communication protocols which involve various hash algorithms of different security level. This paper presents a reconfigurable hardware design to support different protocols, which use SHA-1 or MD5 hash algorithm. Because it implements two algorithms with one set of hardware and only uses two 32-bits registers in the data-path, this design is also an ultra low cost solution for portable communication devices.