Abstract

March, 1997 Abstract We describe a construction of almost universal hash functions suitable for very fast software implementation and applicable to the hashing of variable size data and fast cryptographic message authentication. Our construction uses fast single precision arithmetic which is increasingly supported by modern processors due to the growing needs for fast arithmetic posed by multimedia applications. We report on hand-optimized assembly implementations on a 150 MHz PowerPC 604 and a 150 MHz Pentium-Pro, which achieve hashing speeds of 350 to 820 Mbit/sec, depending on the desired level of security (or collision probability), and a rate of more than 1 Gbit/sec on a 200 MHz Pentium-Pro. This represents a significant speed-up over current software implementations of universal hashing and other message authentication techniques (e.g., MD5-based). Moreover, our construction is specifically designed to take advantage of emerging microprocessor technologies (such as Intel's MMX, ...

Citations