SHA-3
October 3rd, 2012 | Published in Uncategorized
Via The Register, NIST has chosen a winner in its competition to select a new secure hash algorithm, SHA-3. The winner, Keccak, was apparently selected at least in part because it doesn’t belong to the MD5 family of hash algorithms that SHA-1 and the four SHA-2 algorithms belong to. One of the four authors of this algorithm, Joan Daemen, was also a coauthor of the Rijndael algorithm that was selected for AES.
Also, NIST seems to be saying that SHA-3 should supplement but not replace SHA-2, which is still considered quite secure. (Cryptography guru Bruce Schneider, whose Skein algorithm was one of the five finalists for SHA-3, said last week that he hoped NIST would decide not to pick a new algorithm, because “We didn’t know [in 2006 when the SHA-3 contest was announced] how long the various SHA-2 variants would remain secure. But it’s 2012, and SHA-512 is still looking good.” He seems OK with the result, though.)