SANS ISC: And the SHA-3 title goes to .....Keccak

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In response to a number of attacks  on SHA , NIST started to look for the successor to SHA-2, figuring that it was likely that it to may fall.  To date that hasn't occurred and SHA-512 still looks strong.  The competition proceeded and was whittled down from 64 candidates over a number of rounds.  Yesterday NIST annouced the winner of the SHA-3 competition Keccak http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/winner_sha-3.html 

Keccak (pronounced catch-ack) was developed by: Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters and Gilles Van Assche. More details on the actual algorithm can be found here http://keccak.noekeon.org/.

What does it mean for us?  Well you will start seeing SHA-3 folded into FIPS 180-4. You'll start to see the algorithm becoming available within the various security products that require hashing functions.  Until then and possible still even then you can use SHA-512.

Cheers

Mark H