Software implementation of Standard Hash Algorithm (SHA-3) Keccak on Intel core-i5 and Cavium Networks Octeon Plus embedded platform

Keccak is the new Standard Hash Algorithm (SHA-3) to complement the existing hash standard SHA-2. The hash function has been selected after five years of tough competition and continuous evaluation in various aspects. Apart from security, performance evaluation of hash function is of significant importance and has been the key criteria in its selection. In this paper, we present a software implementation of Keccak - 512 on two unexplored platforms - Intel core-i5 and Cavium Networks Octeon embedded platform. The main contribution of the paper is the benchmarking of our code on the former platform and its comparison with benchmarking results of other Keccak implementations. Comparisons reveal significant improvement in performance metrics of cycles/byte and bandwidth.