ATHENa – Automated Tool for Hardware EvaluatioN: Toward Fair and Comprehensive Benchmarking of Cryptographic Algorithms using FPGAs

In this talk, we will introduce an open-source en­ vironment, called ATHENa for fair, comprehensive, automated, and collaborative hardware benchmarking of cryptographic al­ gorithms. We believe that this environment is very suitable for use in evaluation of hardware performance of SHA-3 candidates from the point of view of speed, resource utilization, cost, power consumption, etc. At this point, the environment supports the evaluation using several families of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) from two major vendors, Xilinx and Altera. The environment is accompanied by a comprehensive website and database of results. We encourage all FPGA benchmarking teams to use our environment in their evaluations of SHA-3 candidates, and share their results, constraint files, testbenches, test vectors, and possibly even source codes using our web site. All results will be displayed in the form of the web based interactive tables permitting searching, filtering, ranking, and organizing multiple sets of data from various groups. All results pertaining to the comparison of the SHA-3 candidates, collected by the time of the conference, will be summarized and highlighted in our talk. This way, the presented ranking of Round 2 SHA-3 candidates will be based on the best results available for each candidate, rather than results obtained by a single group. In the future, in collaboration with other groups, we are planning to extend our database of results to cover the results for ASIC and software implementations, and allow the comparison of selected universal performance measures, such as maximum throughput, across multiple technologies.