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Title: Parallelism of the SANDstorm hash algorithm.

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/993877· OSTI ID:993877

Mainstream cryptographic hashing algorithms are not parallelizable. This limits their speed and they are not able to take advantage of the current trend of being run on multi-core platforms. Being limited in speed limits their usefulness as an authentication mechanism in secure communications. Sandia researchers have created a new cryptographic hashing algorithm, SANDstorm, which was specifically designed to take advantage of multi-core processing and be parallelizable on a wide range of platforms. This report describes a late-start LDRD effort to verify the parallelizability claims of the SANDstorm designers. We have shown, with operating code and bench testing, that the SANDstorm algorithm may be trivially parallelized on a wide range of hardware platforms. Implementations using OpenMP demonstrates a linear speedup with multiple cores. We have also shown significant performance gains with optimized C code and the use of assembly instructions to exploit particular platform capabilities.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Albuquerque, NM, and Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000
OSTI ID:
993877
Report Number(s):
SAND2009-6093; TRN: US201101%%105
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English