Implementation of SHA-3 candidate skein on two unexplored multiprocessor platforms

Skein is a cryptographic hash function that has been subjected to test analysis and performance evaluation on various software and hardware platforms. This work investigates the performance of sequential and parallel processing of Skein on two platforms that have not been explored yet: Intel Core-i5 2450M processor and Cavium Networks CN5860 OCTEON Plus processor. Conventional Skein has been implemented for its evaluation using single core. However, to explore its performance using multiple cores, parallel processing algorithm has been implemented on the two platforms using multithreading. Hash tree structure has been used for data independency.