Gaj, KrisLorentz, Robert2012-01-31NO_RESTRIC2012-01-312012-01-31https://hdl.handle.net/1920/7496In 2007, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a public competition to develop a new cryptographic hash algorithm to become the SHA-3 standard. This algorithm should allow flexibility in the design tradeoff decisions between performance and circuit area. This study evaluated two SHA-3 Round 2 Candidate Algorithms, Blue Midnight Wish and CubeHash, to define their performance space in FPGA hardware. High throughput designs were created using multi-message techniques, and single-message Basic Iterative and Folded techniques were applied to find designs of relatively low area. The results show a large performance range for both algorithms, but the fine granularity achieved with parallel cores of CubeHash is superior to the inflexible pipelined architecture of Blue Midnight Wish.en-USFPGASHA-3CryptographyHash FunctionBlue Midnight WishCube HashThesis