HMT: A Hardware-Centric Hybrid Bonsai Merkle Tree Algorithm for High-Performance Authentication
Rakin Muhammad Shadab, Yu Zou, Sanjay Gandham, Amro Awad, Mingjie, Lin

TL;DR
This paper introduces HMT, a hardware-centric hybrid Bonsai Merkle Tree algorithm optimized for FPGA platforms, achieving significant improvements in bandwidth, latency, and execution speed for secure data authentication.
Contribution
HMT presents a novel parallel, hardware-friendly BMT algorithm with relaxed update mechanisms and a specialized controller, enhancing performance on FPGA-based secure systems.
Findings
Up to 7x bandwidth improvement
Up to 4.5x latency reduction
14% faster execution on FPGA benchmarks
Abstract
Merkle tree is a widely used tree structure for authentication of data/metadata in a secure computing system. Recent state-of-the art secure systems use a smaller-sized MT, namely Bonsai Merkle Tree (BMT) to protect the metadata such as encryption counters. Common BMT algorithms were designed for traditional Von Neumann architectures with a software-centric implementation in mind, hence they use a lot of recursions and are often sequential in nature. However, the modern heterogeneous computing platforms employing Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices require concurrency-focused algorithms to fully utilize the versatility and parallel nature of such systems. Our goal for this work is to introduce HMT, a hardware-friendly BMT algorithm that enables the verification and update processes to function independently and provides the benefits of relaxed update while being comparable to…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCryptography and Data Security · Advanced Data Storage Technologies · Network Packet Processing and Optimization
