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

[Omnifarious]

I consider Bruce Scheier as a cryptographer to be sort of like Carl Sagan as an astronomer. I think he is a competent cryptographer, but I think he has much greater value as a person who can speak cogently about the issues surrounding cryptography.

In this case, my guess is that he led the overall vision of how Skein should work but that the other people who worked on the algorithm filled in the details. In particular, I strongly suspect that Niels Ferguson is principally responsible for the core algorithm. Of course, pulling apart any particular collaboration and looking for the efforts of individuals can be tricky and error prone at best.

Re:I was a little worried

[mTor]

Skein is getting a lot of attention because Bruce Schneier is one of it's authors. It's a fine algorithm. Personally, after going through a bunch of them, I like BLAKE the best since its extremely simple and relies on old and proven functions that have withstood the test of time. Not to mention that it's extremely fast. I also like Blue Midnight Wish. I think the NIST will pick one of these three.

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.