NIST is about to announce the new hash algorithm that will become SHA-3. This is the result of a six-year competition, and my own Skein is one of the five remaining finalists (out of an initial 64).
It’s probably too late for me to affect the final decision, but I am hoping for “no award.”
It’s not that the new hash functions aren’t any good, it’s that we don’t really need one. When we started this process back in 2006, it looked as if we would…
