International Association
for Cryptologic Research

There exists a broad range of RFID protocols in literature that propose hash functions as cryptographic primitives. Since Keccak has been selected as the winner of the NIST SHA-3 competition in 2012, there is the question of how far we can push the limits of Keccak to fulfill the stringent requirements of passive low-cost RFID. In this paper, we address this question by presenting a hardware implementation of Keccak that aims for lowest power and lowest area. Our smallest (full-state) design requires only 2\\,927 GEs (for designs with external memory available) and 5\\,522 GEs (total size including memory). It has a power consumption of $12.5\\,\\mu$W at 1\\,MHz on a low leakage 130\\,nm CMOS process technology. As a result, we provide a design that needs 40\\,\\% less resources than related work. Our design is even smaller than the smallest SHA-1 and SHA-2 implementations.