Parallelism of the SANDstorm hash algorithm.

Mainstream cryptographic hashing algorithms are not parallelizable. This limits their speed and they are not able to take advantage of the current trend of being run on multi-core platforms. Being limited in speed limits their usefulness as an authentication mechanism in secure communications. Sandia researchers have created a new cryptographic hashing algorithm, SANDstorm, which was specifically designed to take advantage of multi-core processing and be parallelizable on a wide range of platforms. This report describes a late-start LDRD effort to verify the parallelizability claims of the SANDstorm designers. We have shown, with operating code and bench testing, that the SANDstorm algorithm may be trivially parallelized on a wide range of hardware platforms. Implementations using OpenMP demonstrates a linear speedup with multiple cores. We have also shown significant performance gains with optimized C code and the use of assembly instructions to exploit particular platform capabilities.