Abstract—The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created an open competition to find a new standard for cryptographic hashing in 2007. The competition was composed of a number of rounds that ended with 5 finalists (BLAKE, Grostl, JH, Keccak, Skein) in December of 2010. This research paper will examine the power consumption of the 5 finalists on the Xilinx Spartan3E FPGA. The results in this paper will allow developers examining including a hash function in a hardware design to have a full understanding of the power requirements and aid the developer in making an inform decision. The results show that the Keccak algorithm has the best tradeoff of power to speed and the BLAKE algorithm is the best choice for low power design.

Index Terms—FPGA, hashing, power analysis, SHA-3

A. Jaffar and C. Martinez are with the University of New Haven, West Haven, CT 06516 USA (e-mail: ajaff1@unh.newhaven.edu; cmartinez@newhaven.edu).