Improving the performance of Luffa Hash Algorithm

Luffa is a new hash algorithm that has been accepted for round two of the NIST hash function competition SHA-3. Computational efficiency is the second most important evaluation criteria used to compare candidate algorithms. In this paper, we describe a fast software implementation of the Luffa hash algorithm for the Intel Core 2 Duo platform. We explore the use of the perfect shuffle operation to improve the performance of 64-bit implementation and 128-bit implementation with the Intel Supplemental SSSE3 instructions. In addition, we introduce a new way of implementing Luffa based on a Parallel Table Lookup instruction. The timings of our 64-bit implementation (C code) resulted in a 16 to 32% speed improvement over the previous fastest implementation.