IP Cores, Inc. Announces Shipment of a New Version of its SHA Family of Hash Cores

IP Cores, Inc. . Announces Shipment of a New Version of its SHA Family of IP Cores for Cryptographic Hashes.

Palo Alto, California -- April 8, 2010 -- IP Cores, Inc. (http://www.ipcores.com) has announced first shipments of a new version of IP cores from its SHA family of cores performing cryptographic hash algorithms. Cryptographic hashes are widely used in the secure communication protocols.  

"We updated our SHA family of cores to support an HMAC function inside the core," said Dmitri Varsanofiev, CTO of IP Cores. "The integration of the SHA cores with traditional public-key digital signature algorithms, like RSA or ECDSA became much easier."

SHA Hash Functions and HMAC

The SHA cryptographic hash functions are designed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS). The name of SHA stands for a Secure Hash Algorithm. The two SHA algorithms currently used are called SHA-1 and SHA-2. The SHA-2 algorithm comes in four versions with different digest sizes usually called SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512.

HMAC (Hash-based Message Authentication Code) is an algorithm for calculating a message authentication code (MAC) that involves a cryptographic hash function along with a secret key. It is used to verify both the data integrity and the authenticity on a communication link.

SHA Family of  Cores

Original SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 cores have implemented the corresponding versions of the SHA algorithm, leaving the HMAC implementation in the external wrapper.

The new “stored key” (-SK) option of these cores integrate the HMAC calculation into the core. While larger than their non-HMAC counterparts, the –SK cores are very compact. For example, a SHA-256/8-SK requires just 19K ASIC gates (the original SHA-256/8 used 11K gates).

SHA datasheet is available on the IP Cores, Inc. Web site at http://ipcores.com/sha_ip_core.htm .

For more information about IP Cores’ product line, please visit www.ipcores.com .

About IP Cores, Inc.

IP Cores is a rapidly growing company in the field of security and DSP IP cores. Founded in 2004, the company provides IP cores for communications and  storage fields, including AES-based ECB/CBC/OCB/CFB, AES-GCM and AES-XTS cores, flow-through AES/CCM cores with header parsing for IEEE 802.11 (WiFi), 802.16e (WiMAX), 802.15.3 (MBOA), 802.15.4 (Zigbee), public-key accelerators for RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators (CS PRNG), secure SHA and MD5 hashes, lossless data compression cores, low-latency fixed and floating-point FFT and  IFFT cores, as well as Reed-Solomon, BCH and Viterbi decoder cores.