SHA-3

SHA-3 (Secure Hash Algorithm 3), a subset of the cryptographic primitive family Keccak (/ˈkætʃæk/, or /kɛtʃɑːk/), is a cryptographic hash function designed by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters, and Gilles Van Assche, building upon RadioGatún. SHA-3 is a member of the Secure Hash Algorithm family. The SHA-3 standard was released by NIST on August 5, 2015. The reference implementation source code was dedicated to public domain via CC0 waiver.

History

The Keccak algorithm is the work of Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen (who also co-designed the Rijndael cipher with Vincent Rijmen), Michael Peeters, and Gilles Van Assche. It is based on earlier hash function designs PANAMA and RadioGatún. PANAMA was designed by Daemen and Craig Clapp in 1998. RadioGatún, a successor of PANAMA, was designed by Daemen, Peeters, and Van Assche, and was presented at the NIST Hash Workshop in 2006.

In 2006 NIST started to organize the NIST hash function competition to create new hash standard, SHA-3. SHA-3 is not meant to replace SHA-2, as no significant attack on SHA-2 has been demonstrated. Because of the successful attacks on MD5 and SHA-0 and theoretical attacks on SHA-1, NIST perceived a need for an alternative, dissimilar cryptographic hash, which became SHA-3.