Planet SoC

news, security
17:09 -0500

No, not that kind of hash. The NIST is holding a contest for a
new cryptographic hash function.
Vulnerabilities have been found in the most commonly used hash functions, MD5
and SHA-1, and the contest is for the new SHA-3 standard. The deadline for
submissions was last Friday, so if you missed it, too bad.

Schneier et al. have submitted their algorithm, called
skein, and Rivest et al. have submitted
MD6.

The NIST held a similar contest several years back for encryption algorithms,
which resulted in Rijndael being officially named as the Advanced Encryption
Standard. That contest took 5 years. We’ll see how long this one takes.
Hashing is generally less well-understood, and harder to do, than encryption.