High-Speed FPGA Implementation of the SHA-1 Hash Function

The main applications of the Hash functions lie in the fields of communication integrity and authentication. In every communication protocol, especially in mobile protocols, a Hash function is employed in the security layer. However, as communication protocols evolve and new high-performance applications appear, the throughput of hash functions seems to reach to a limit. Especially the SHA-1 Hash function, which is common in the majority of the wireless protocols (WAP etc.), was limited to a maximum throughput of 2 Gbps. In this paper, a new implementation is introduced to exceed this limit improving the throughput by 37% without significant area penalty.