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Led by Reza Azarderakhsh, Ph.D.

REU Scholar: Maggie Simmons

REU Scholar Home Institution: Rice University

REU Mentor: Reza Azarderakhsh, Ph.D.

Efficient and Secure Hashing with SHA3: Memory, Throughput, and Security Software Optimizations on ARM M4 Cortex

The advent of quantum computing poses a significant threat to modern cryptographic systems such as RSA and ECC, necessitating the development and deployment of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to safeguard data integrity and security. Cryptographic hashes are a key primitive in PQC algorithms and play a pivotal role in ensuring data integrity and authentication. SHA-3, the latest member of the Secure Hash Algorithm, accounts for over 70 percent of the clock cycles of PQC algorithms such as Kyber, XMSS, and Sphincs+, making efficient implementation of SHA-3 crucial to the performance and security of PQC. Due to the limited resources of IoT devices, the computational cost of SHA-3 is exacerbated, necessitating optimization to make PQC feasible on embedded devices. In this presentation, we explore efficient implementations of SHA-3 in both C and Assembly, in addition to software optimizations of SHA-3 for ARM Cortex M-4 devices. By optimizing SHA-3 implementations, developers can ensure that this algorithm remains practical for widespread use in a post-quantum world, providing a reliable foundation for secure communications and data protection.