Verification of SHA-256 and MD5 Hash Functions Using UVM

Data integrity assurance and data origin authentication are important security aspects in commerce, financial transfer, banking, software, email, data storage, etc. Cryptographic hash functions specified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides secure algorithms for data security. Hash functions are designed to digest the data and produce a hash message; a hash is a one-way function which is highly secured and difficult to invert. In this paper, two such hash algorithms are verified using the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM). UVM is IEEE 1800 standard developed to assist in the verification of digital designs; it reduces the hurdle in verifying complex and sophisticated designs.