The Competition For SHA-3

Technocrat

The Competition For SHA-3

Bhima

Wed Oct 29 09:52:00 -0700 2008

Security.

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The deadline for entries to NIST's public competition to develop a new cryptographic hash algorithm is this Friday the 31st of October 2008.

Today Bruce Schneier has annouced the Skein Hash Function Family and earlier this year at Crypto'08, Ron Rivest presented MD6. The number of submissions is expected to top at least 80, which a fair bit more than the 21 submissions for the AES contest. So don't expect the results of this competition any time soon... Bruce expects a "Cryptographic Demolition Derby" lasting about 4 years.

The Competition For SHA-3

Thomas Lord

Wed Oct 29 11:32:23 -0700 2008
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Thanks for the links. The Schneier post is especially fascinating for the clarity it displays in defining the problem. At the "executive summary" level offered there, it sure quacks like and looks plausibly like good engineering.

As more of a systems guy, not at all a hash function designer, I'm psyched to see this work. Good hashes are extremely important to emerging architectures. People in the free software world may have noted Torvald's "git" and the role that hashes play there in "content addressed storage". That's just the tip of the iceburg. Torvald's clued in to and expressed in popularly accessible form the underlying long-term push to build a global, P2P file system for which purpose we not only want a good, fast, small hash: we want many of them.

-t