NIST Opens Competition for a New Hash Algorithm

Posted by Zonk on Friday November 9, 2007 @07:00AM from the not-that-long-to-wait dept.

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology has opened a public competition for the development of a new cryptographic hash algorithm, which will be called Secure Hash Algorithm-3 (SHA-3), and will augment the current algorithms specified in the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-2. This is in response to serious attacks reported in recent years against cryptographic hash algorithms, including SHA-1, and because SHA-1 and the SHA-2 family share a similar design. Submissions are being accepted through October 2008, and the competition timeline indicates that a winner will be announced in 2012."

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Re:Very similar to the AES competition by ceswiedler · 2007-11-09 10:10 · Score: 1, Redundant

I'm too lazy to find the quote, but Bruce Schneier said that the NSA's comments on DES effectively started the field of modern academic cryptography, and that many researchers 'made their bones' analyzing why the changes to DES were important. Thus at the time, the NSA was over a decade ahead, but it's very unlikely they're that far ahead now.