The continued growth of both wired and wireless communications has triggered the revolution for high speed security implementations. RIPEMD hash functions are widely used, in many applications of cryptography. A reconfigurable processor architecture and the VLSI implementation of these functions are proposed in this work. The introduced processor is reconfigurable in the sense that performs alternatively all RIPEMD hash functions. In order to indicate the advantages of the proposed design, each one of these hash functions has also been implemented in a separate hardware device (FPGA). The proposed processor FPGA implementation achieves high speed hashing up to 2Gbps. Comparing with previous published hardware designs, the proposed processor has higher performance in the range from 22 to 30 times. It also performs much better than the assembly language implementations of the RIPEMD-128 and RIPEMD-160. The proposed processor could be used for the implementation of data integrity units, and in many other sensitive cryptographic applications, such as, digital signatures, message authentication codes and random number generators.