TITLE:
A j-Lanes Tree Hashing Mode and j-Lanes SHA-256
AUTHORS:
Shay Gueron
KEYWORDS:
Tree Mode Hashing; SHA-256; SHA3 Competition; SIMD Architecture; Advanced Vector Extensions Architectures; AVX; AVX2
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Information Security,
Vol.4 No.1,
January
30,
2013
ABSTRACT: j-lanes hashing is a tree mode that splits an input message to j slices, computes j independent digests of each slice, and outputs the hash value of their concatenation. We demonstrate the performance advantage of j-lanes hashing on SIMD architectures, by coding a 4-lanes-SHA-256 implementation and measuring its performance on the latest 3rd Generation IntelR CoreTM. For messages whose lengths range from 2 KB to 132 KB, we show that the 4-lanes SHA-256 is between 1.5 to 1.97 times faster than the fastest publicly available implementation that we are aware of, and between ~2 to ~2.5 times faster than the OpenSSL 1.0.1c implementation. For long messages, there is no significant performance difference between different choices of j. We show that the 4-lanes SHA-256 is faster than the two SHA3 finalists (BLAKE and Keccak) that have a published tree mode implementation. Finally, we explain why j-lanes hashing will be faster on the coming AVX2 architecture that facilitates using 256 bits registers. These results suggest that standardizing a tree mode for hash functions (SHA-256 in particular) could be useful for performance hungry applications.