VLSI Architecture Design for MD5 Hashing Algorithm

Abstract

Data integrity assurance and data origin authentication are essential security services in financial transactions, electronic commerce, electronic mail, software distribution, data storage and so on. The broadest definition of authentication within computing systems encompasses identity verification, message origin authentication and message content authentication. In IPSEC, the technique of cryptographic hash functions is utilized to achieve these security services. A cryptographic hash function is a hash function which is considered practically impossible to invert, that is, to recreate the input data from its hash value alone. The ideal cryptographic hash function has four main properties:  It is easy to compute the hash value for any given message  It is infeasible to generate a message that has a given hash  It is infeasible to modify a message without changing the hash  It is infeasible to find two different messages with the same hash. A cryptographic hash function must be able to withstand all known types of cryptanalytic attack. At a minimum, it must have the following properties:  Pre-image resistance Given a hash h it should be difficult to find any message m such that h = hash(m). This concept is related to that of one-way function. Functions that lack this property are vulnerable to pre image attacks