High-performance implementation of a new hash function on FPGA

Skein has the advantages of higher security (resisting against traditional attacks), faster speed and selectable parameters. Therefore, it becomes a strong competitor for next generation secure hash algorithm standard (SHA-3) which will be used widely in communication and security for substitution of SHA-2. The problems of existing works lie in implementation for only one structure and lack detailed comparison of different structures. Based on analysis of the algorithm, we accomplished three structures (iterative, 4-unrolled and 8-unrolled) of Skein and ported the designs to FPGA respectively. Finally detailed analysis and comparison with our different structures and other implementations are provided from aspects of hardware resource and performance. The results show that our implementation has better performance and takes up less hardware resources than existing works under the same structure. Our implementation can meet the requirement of real-time and high performance field.