Multi-Stream Hashing on the PlayStation 3

With process technology providing more and more transistors per chip, still following Moore's \law", processor designers have used a number of techniques to make those transistors useful. Lately they have started placing multiple processor cores on each chip; an example is the Cell Broadband Engine, which serves as the heart of Sony's PlayStation 3 game console. We present high-performance multi-stream versions of cryptographic hash functions from the MD/SHA-family. Our implementations require 1.74, 3.51 and 8.18 cycles per byte per SPE when using the cryptographic hash functions MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 respectively. To the best of our knowledge these are the fastest implementations of these hash functions for the Cell processor. These implementations can be useful for cryptanalytic use as well as for utilizing the SPEs as cryptographic accelerators.