Keccak wins the SHA-3 competition

http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/winner_sha-3.html

by B-Con • 14 years ago

196 41 14 years ago

csrc.nist.gov

tptacek5• 14 years ago

Discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4604188

JL2010• 14 years ago

I find it interesting that the contributors work for semiconductor companies. I would've thought that something like this would be more likely to emerge from a team with a mathematics/CS/academic background more so than hardware. Perhaps these algorithms can (and will) be going strait into some new hardware cryptography IP cores?

unix-dude• 14 years ago

I only tangentially follow the semiconductor companies...

However, I know several advanced algorithms in the realm of cryptography can be computationally expensive, and as demand for security grows, several of these semiconductor companies have implemented things in the hardware to optimize certain forms of encryption. (I can't remember if it was Intel or AMD that released a chip with some sort of built-in support for security).

This is just a theory, but if they're going down this road, it would make sense for them to develop a highly secure algorithm that they know can be easily implemented and optimized on the hardware level. If they're developing specialized algorithms AND hardware, they can probably take it into account during the design process and further optimize their boards.

Or, a bunch of semiconductor guys are also crypto-geeks. Which is pretty likely anyway :D.

novalis• 14 years ago

You were maybe thinking of Intel® vPro™ Technology ?

pjscott• 14 years ago

All of the SHA-3 candidates were designed to be implementable in fast hardware. Here's a comparison of some of the hardware designs evaluated during the competition:

http://ehash.iaik.tugraz.at/wiki/SHA-3_Hardware_Implementati...

Keccak is one of the most amenable to hardware acceleration, but all of the finalists were good in both hardware and software.

cokernel_hacker• 14 years ago

They are all cryptographers and at least three of them have deep academic backgrounds...

Guido Bertoni: http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/...

Joan Daemen: http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/d/...

Gilles Van Assche: http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/a/...

Joan Daemen has a PhD, his thesis was "Cipher and Hash Function Design. Strategies based on linear and differential cryptanalysis"

Gilles Van Assche was a PhD student at the University of Brussels studying "classical and quantum information theory" (http://gva.noekeon.org/)

zhuzhuor• 14 years ago

Just to add another fact here: Daemen is also one of the two co-authors of AES

derrida2• 14 years ago

Dear media: It's pronounced 'ketchup'.

gjm11• 14 years ago

No, it's pronounced "ketchak". See http://keccak.noekeon.org/specs_summary.html .

derrida2• 14 years ago

You spoiled the fun.

turtlepower• 14 years ago

It's pronounced "shah three."

16s• 14 years ago

I laughed out loud when I read your comment. Very good!

tptacek5• 14 years ago

Because that is the chemical formula for ketchup.

gourneau• 14 years ago

Why is the Bid/Ask spread so high right now for STMs stock? http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=STM

dfc• 14 years ago

This is normal for low volume stocks during after hours trading.

e1ven• 14 years ago

So, if I'm writing a new application in 2012, should I use SHA-512, or keccak? If course SHA2 will have better library support... What other considerations are there?

tptacek5• 14 years ago

You should use SHA2 for now, but be careful no matter what you use.

brazzy• 14 years ago

Given that Bruce Schneier wrote that he'd prefer not having an SHA-3 winner since the SHA-2 algorithms were not showing any weaknesses yet...

maaku• 14 years ago

That's out of context; Schneier said there isn't one that's significantly better (which he defined as "orders of magnitude") than SHA-2. But they're all strictly better than SHA-2.

If you're writing a new application, by all means use the new standard. If you have an existing application or have to interface with existing frameworks, use SHA-2.

jayflux• 14 years ago

So you'd prefer they wait until SHA-2 suffers weakness before starting to bring out SHA-3?

pshc• 14 years ago

Also curious about this. I'm writing something with a DAG storage scheme similar to git, currently using SHA-256 to hash blobs. Been thinking about switching to SHA-512, but there's no rush as I can easily switch hash functions anytime before initial public release. How much time/what indicators can I look for before considering a switch to SHA-3?

raverbashing• 14 years ago

For regular hashing it makes no difference

For cryptographic hashing it may make a difference, depending on the context.

dchest3• 14 years ago

For git-like storage schemes speed is important. Keccak is slower than SHA-512, so you probably wouldn't want to switch to it.

masklinn• 14 years ago

Either, possibly neither. Depends what you want to use that hash for.

zokier• 14 years ago

Obvious solution would be to make the application capable of using both. I would default to SHA-512, but I don' see any reason why the hash function should be fixed.

tptacek5• 14 years ago

Interesting footnote: because of concerns about the security of both SHA-1 and MD5, the original SSL3 protocol used both MD5 and SHA1 as its PRF. TLS 1.1 changes that with a PRF that relies solely on SHA-2.

zheng• 14 years ago

Let's say I know a little bit about crypto in general, and wanted to write a software implementation of Keccak/SHA-3 as an academic endeavor. How hard would it be? I'm not looking to produce something that will be certifiably secure against side channel attacks, just something that is reasonably performant and can produce the correct results.

loeg• 14 years ago

Trivial. See this "Readable C implementation of Keccak": http://www.mjos.fi/dist/readable_keccak.tgz

chmike• 14 years ago

Is there a free to use and fast implementation of SHA3 in C available ?

dchest3• 14 years ago

No, the standard hasn't been published yet.

Yes, see here for Keccak implementations http://keccak.noekeon.org/files.html

__alexs• 14 years ago

http://keccak.noekeon.org/files.html

The C code appears to be public domain. Which might be a problem in regions in which public domain is not a thing but should otherwise be fine for use in most projects.

dchest3• 14 years ago

It's not the problem, the code is under Creative Commons Zero public domain dedication http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

mykhal• 14 years ago

it's funny, we have new standard, so sha256sum, .., sha512sum utilities should start providing us different results - Keccak, instead of SHA-2 :) i'm wondering how the naming issue is going to be solved

fpp• 14 years ago

Wikipedia already has a 3 page description of the Keccak hash approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keccak

Keccak wins the SHA-3 competition

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