A Hardware-Software Codesign Case Study: The SHA3-512 algorithm Implementation on the LEON3 Processor

With the ever-increasing role that software is playing in embedded systems, software performance is one of the embedded system implementation goals. In this paper we consider the software cryptographic hash-functions implementation on hardware platforms. In fact, Hash functions are used in several information-security applications like message authentication codes, digital signatures and other forms of authentication. As a case study, we consider The SHA3-512 algorithm implementation on the LEON3 soft core Processor. The SHA3-512 is programmed and optimized using the C language in order to be implemented on LEON3 using the ML507 Virtex-5 Xilinx FPGA board.