SHA-3 Second Round Candidates Released

Jeremy A. Hansen writes "NIST just announced their selections for algorithms going to the second round of the SHA-3 competition. Quoting: 'NIST received 64 SHA-3 candidate hash function submissions and accepted 51 first round candidates as meeting our minimum acceptance criteria. We have now selected 14 second round candidates to continue in the competition. Information about the second round candidate algorithms will be available here. We were pleased by the amount and quality of the cryptanalysis we received on the first round candidates, and more than a little amazed by the ingenuity of some of the attacks. ... In selecting this set of second round candidates we tried to include only algorithms that we thought had a chance of being selected as SHA-3. We were willing to extrapolate higher performance for conservative designs with apparently large safety factors, but comparatively unforgiving of aggressive designs that were broken, or nearly broken during the course of the review. We were more willing to accept disquieting properties of the hash function if the designer had apparently anticipated them, than if they were discovered during the review period, even if there were apparent fixes. We were generally alarmed by attacks on compression functions that seemed unanticipated by the submitters.'"

Comments

Re:I was a little worried

[OverlordQ]

Well Bruce Schneier helped write it, this is the same man that once decrypted a box of AlphaBits.

SHA-3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pff. I'm already using SHA-256.

Re:I was a little worried

[FooAtWFU]

Well Bruce Schneier helped write it, this is the same man that once decrypted a box of AlphaBits.

That's actually bad news: Anybody can invent a cryptosystem he cannot break himself. Except Bruce Schneier.