NIST crowns next-gen hash algorithm Keccak as official SHA-3

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/03/sha-3/

By John Leyden
The Register
3rd October 2012

A US government agency has selected cryptographic hash function Keccak 
as the new official SHA-3 algorithm.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's decision to pick 
the nippy system as the replacement for SHA-1 and SHA-2 marks the end of 
a six-year competitive process. Five algorithms were left in the running 
at the end, including crypto-guru Bruce Schneier's Skein.

Keccak was put together by cryptographers Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, 
Michaël Peeters and Gilles Van Assche, who work for STMicroelectronics 
and NXP Semiconductors. The NIST team praised the algorithm for its 
"elegant design and its ability to run well on many different computing 
devices". The system is said to take 13 processor cycles on a 2.4GHz 
Intel Core 2 Duo to process each byte of data, and can be implemented in 
hardware.

SHA-2 is used in various security technologies, from SSL and SSH to PGP 
and IPsec, and must be used by law in certain US government 
applications. Like its predecessor, Keccak converts information into a 
shortened "message digest", from which it is impossible to recover the 
original information, and thwarts attempts to generate an identical 
digest from two different blocks of input data.

[...]

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