HashPIM: High-Throughput SHA-3 via Memristive Digital Processing-in-Memory

Abstract: Recent research has sought to accelerate cryptographic hash functions as they are at the core of modern cryptography. Traditional designs, however, suffer from the von Neumann bottleneck that originates from the separation of processing and memory units. An emerging solution to overcome this bottleneck is processing-in-memory (PIM): performing logic within the same devices responsible for memory to eliminate data-transfer and simultaneously provide massive computational parallelism. In this paper, we seek to vastly accelerate the state-of-the-art SHA-3 cryptographic function using the memristive memory processing unit (mMPU), a general-purpose memristive PIM architecture. To that end, we propose a novel in-memory algorithm for variable rotation, and utilize an efficient mapping of the SHA-3 state vector for memristive crossbar arrays to efficiently exploit PIM parallelism. We demonstrate a massive energy efficiency of 1,422 Gbps/W, improving a state-of-the-art memristive SHA-3 accelerator (SHINE-2) by 4.6x.