Skein (hash function)
cryptographic hash function
Skein is a cryptographic hash function and one of five finalists in the NIST hash function competition. Entered as a candidate to become the SHA-3 standard, the successor of SHA-1 and SHA-2, it ultimately lost to NIST hash candidate Keccak.
The name Skein refers to how the Skein function intertwines the input, similar to a skein of yarn. Skein was designed to natively support arbitrary, variable-length outputs, so it can be considered an extendable-output function (XOF).
History
Skein was created by Bruce Schneier, Niels Ferguson, Stefan Lucks, Doug Whiting, Mihir Bellare, Tadayoshi Kohno, Jon Callas and Jesse Walker.
Skein is based on the Threefish tweakable block cipher compressed using Unique Block Iteration (UBI) chaining mode, a variant of the Matyas–Meyer–Oseas hash mode, while leveraging an optional low-overhead argument-system for flexibility.
Skein's algorithm and a reference implementation was given to public domain.
Functionality
Skein supports internal state sizes of 256, 512 and 1024 bits, and arbitrary output sizes.
The authors claim 6.1 cycles per byte for any output size on an Intel Core 2 Duo in 64-bit mode.
The core of Threefish is based on a MIX function that transforms 2 64-bit words using a single addition, rotation by a constant and XOR. The UBI chaining mode combines an input chaining value with an arbitrary length input string and produces a fixed size output.
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This entry incorporates text from “Skein (hash function)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.