Liga Anwar
Research Institute CODE, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany

Carlos Andres Lara-Nino
Research Institute CODE, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany

Jong-Yeon Park
Research Institute CODE, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany

Michael Hutter
Research Institute CODE, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany; PQShield, Austria

Keywords: Hardware Implementation, SHA-2, SHA-3, Keccak, Embedded System Security, Crypto Agility, Post-Quantum Cryptography

Abstract

This work composes SHA-2 and SHA-3 into a unified hardware architecture, bringing them together as a single, efficient cryptographic ensemble. This need is driven in particular by Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), where different standardized schemes rely on either SHA-2 or SHA-3/SHAKE primitives. Rather than enforcing strict round-level unification, the proposed design applies selective sharing across the most area-critical components, including a shared 25x64-bit register bank, shared round-constant storage, and unified padding and control logic while maintaining full compliance with FIPS 180-4 and FIPS 202. In addition, a duet execution mode exploits the otherwise underutilized upper half of the 64-bit datapath to process two independent SHA-224/256 streams in parallel, benefiting Merkle-tree-based constructions in hash-based PQC. The design is implemented and synthesized on an Artix-7 FPGA, occupying 5,873 LUTs and 2,310 FFs. Experimental results show that SHARMONY achieves a throughput of 1,959 Mbps for SHA-256, representing improvements of 100–152% over the SHA-256 engines of SLotH, SPHINCSLET, OpenTitan, and Caliptra. At the same time, SHARMONY reduces LUT utilization by an average of 40% and FF utilization by an average of 55% compared to combined designs constructed from separate SHA-2 and SHA-3 implementations.