Accelerated Hardware Implementation of BLAKE2 Cryptographic Hash for Blockchain

Abstract

Interest in the efficient implementations of hashing algorithms has received even more attention recently due to the growing application-space for blockchain technology. Consequently, a pressing need has arisen to develop high-performance hashing techniques to support these developments. In this paper, an architecture and VLSI implementation of the newest hashing standard, BLAKE2, is presented. The Equihash algorithm serves as a use case for BLAKE2 in Blockchain. An FPGA-based custom computing machine (FCCM) approach is used. This approach is producing an accelerated Equihash hashing-core system which is 5x faster than an ARM Cortex-A9 based system on a ZC706 SoC chip for 0.27 W. Indeed, this is the first BLAKE2 implementation allowing fast execution, and effective substitution of any previous hash families implementations.