Since the discovery of collision attacks against several well-known cryptographic hash functions in 2004, a rush of new cryptanalytic results cast doubt on the current hash function standards. The relatively new NIST SHA-2 standards aren't yet immediately threatened, but their long-term viability is now in question. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has therefore begun an international competition to select a new SHA-3 standard. This article outlines the competition, its rules, the requirements for the hash function candidates, and the process that NIST will use to select the final winning SHA-3 standard.
[1] 60 S. Wang, Y. Yin, and H. Yu, "Finding Collisions in the Full SHA-1," Proc. Crypto 2005, Springer, 2005, pp. 17–36.
[2] A. Joux, "Multicollisions in Iterated Hash Functions: Application to Cascaded Constructions," Proc. Crypto 2004, Springer, 2004, pp. 306–316.
[3] J. Kelsey and T. Kohno, "Herding Hash Functions and the Nostradamus Attack," Proc. Eurocrypt 2006, Springer, 2006, pp. 183–199.
Index Terms:
cryptographic standards, hash function, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3, Merkle-Damg?rd, Crypto Corner
Citation:
William E. Burr, "A New Hash Competition," IEEE Security and Privacy, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 60-62, May/June 2008, doi:10.1109/MSP.2008.55
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