An ASIC based on Cellular Automata (CA) for data-authentication has been proposed in this paper. The scheme is designed from the analytical study of the state transition behavior of non-group Cellular Automata, and is significantly different from conventional approaches. Experimental studies confirm the superiority in terms of CPU time (50{\%} reduction) of the software implementation of the proposed scheme compared to standard MD-5 algorithm, the most commonly used method. Regular, modular, and cascadable structure of Cellular Automata with local interconnections makes the scheme ideally suitable for VLSI implementation. The CA based hardware can achieve further speed improvement approximately by at least three order, depending on the message length.