Thursday, October 4, 2012

SHA-3 Hash Function - KECCAK


NIST has just announced the selection of KECCAK as the winner of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition and the new SHA-3 hash algorithm on 2nd October 2012. KECCAK has been designed by a team of cryptographers from Belgium and Italy: Guido Bertoni , Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters, and Gilles Van Assche.

NIST had formally announced the SHA-3 competition in 2007 with  an open call for the submission of
candidate hash algorithms, and received 64 submissions from cryptographers around the world. After rigorous evaluations, the NIST winnowed the original 64 candidates down to the five finalist candidates: BLAKE, Grøstl, JH, KECCAK and Skein.


NIST chose KECCAK over the four other excellent finalists for its
(1) elegant design,
(2) large security margin,
(3) good general performance,
(4) excellent efficiency in hardware implementations, and
(5) for its flexibility.

KECCAK has used the new “sponge construction” chaining mode, based on a fixed permutation, that can readily be adjusted to trade generic security strength for throughput, and can generate larger or smaller hash
outputs as required.  The KECCAK designers have also defined a modified chaining mode for KECCAK
that provides authenticated encryption. Additionally, KECCAK complements the existing SHA-2 family of hash algorithms well.

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