Generic Parallel Cryptography for Hashing Schemes

We emphasize that future secure communicating systems, secured mass storages and access policies will require efficient and scalable security algorithms and protocols. More-over, parallelism will be used at quiet low level implementation of software or hardware basic mechanisms for offering efficient support to cryptographic algorithms. In this paper we concentrate on a family of generic schemes for efficient implementation of tree based hash functions. The main reason for designing a parallel algorithm based on a hash tree scheme is to obtain optimal performances when dealing with critical applications which can require tuned implementations for security aspects on multi-core target processors. Indeed, parallelism for cryptographic primitives has become a mandatory feature as imposed also by recent NIST requirements.