Compact Hardware Implementations of the SHA-3 Candidates ARIRANG, BLAKE, Grøstl, and Skein

The weakening of the widely used SHA-1 hash function has also cast doubts on the strength of the related algorithms of the SHA-2 family. The US NIST has therefore initiated the SHA-3 competition in order to select a modern hash function algorithm as a ``backup\u27\u27 for SHA-2. This algorithm should be efficiently implementable both in software and hardware under different constraints. In this paper, we present hardware implementations of the four SHA-3 candidates ARIRANG, BLAKE, Grøstl, and Skein with the primary constraint of minimizing chip area