A Competition To Replace SHA-1

SHA who? writes "In light of recent attacks on SHA-1, NIST is preparing for a competition to augment and revise the current Secure Hash Standard. The public competition will be run much like the development process for the Advance Encryption Standard, and is expected to take 3 years. As a first step, NIST is publishing draft minimum acceptability requirements, submission requirements, and evaluation criteria for candidate algorithms, and requests public comment by April 27, 2007. NIST has ordered Federal agencies to stop using SHA-1 and instead to use the SHA-2 family of hash functions."

Comments

One Word....

[tomstdenis]

WHIRLPOOL.

It's a balanced design, an SPN to boot.

The big problem with the SHA's [and their elk] is that they're all UFN [unbalanced feistel networks], in particular they're source heavy. Which means the the branch/diffusion is minimal (e.g. it's possible to make inputs collide and cancel out differences).

SPN [substitution permutation networks] like WHIRLPOOL are balanced in their branch/diffusion.

Best of all, WHIRLPOOL is already out there. just a sign the paper!

Tom