Novel Non-cryptographic Hash Functions for Networking and Security Applications on FPGA

This paper proposes the design and FPGA implementation of five novel non-cryptographic hash functions, that are suitable to be used in networking and security applications that require fast lookup and/or counting architectures. Our approach is inspired by the design of the existing non-cryptographic hash function Xoodoo-NC, which is constructed through the concatenation of several Xoodoo permutations. We similarly construct non-cryptographic hash functions based on the concatenation of several rounds of symmetric-key ciphers. The goal is to achieve high performance in combination with good avalanche properties, which are required in order to have a significant change in the output value as a result of a limited change in the input value. We simulate how many rounds are needed to achieve satisfactory avalanche scores and we implement the corresponding non-cryptographic hash functions on an FPGA to evaluate the occupied resources and the performance. One of the proposed non-cryptographic hash functions, namely GIFT-NC, outperforms all previously proposed non-cryptographic hash functions in terms of throughput and latency, in exchange for an acceptable increase in FPGA resources.