Abstract:
The Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) is a cryptographic hash function published by the
National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) as a U.S Federal Information and
Processing Standard (FIPS). In the past few years, a flaw discovered in the SHA-1 shows
its vulnerability to attacks. The current hashing standard SHA-2 which shares similarities
to SHA-1 is therefore under scrutiny for a possible attack. In 2007, NIST announced the
SHA-3 competition in hopes of finding a new algorithm with higher margin of security and
which is also more efficient in terms of software and hardware performance. Out of the
51 candidates selected in round one, only five remain in the third and final round namely
BLAKE, Grostl, JH, Keccak and Skein.
