NIST hash function competition

The NIST hash function competition was an open competition held by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a new hash function called SHA-3 to complement the older SHA-1 and SHA-2. The competition was formally announced in the Federal Register on November 2, 2007. "NIST is initiating an effort to develop one or more additional hash algorithms through a public competition, similar to the development process for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)." The competition ended on October 2, 2012 when the NIST announced that Keccak would be the new SHA-3 hash algorithm.

The winning hash function has been published as NIST FIPS 202 the "SHA-3 Standard", to complement FIPS 180-4, the Secure Hash Standard.

The NIST competition has inspired other competitions such as the Password Hashing Competition.

Submissions were due October 31, 2008 and the list of candidates accepted for the first round was published on December 9, 2008. NIST held a conference in late February 2009 where submitters presented their algorithms and NIST officials discussed criteria for narrowing down the field of candidates for Round 2. The list of 14 candidates accepted to Round 2 was published on July 24, 2009. Another conference was held on August 23–24, 2010 (after CRYPTO 2010) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the second-round candidates were discussed. The announcement of the final round candidates occurred on December 10, 2010. On October 2, 2012, the NIST announced its winner, choosing Keccak, created by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, and Gilles Van Assche of STMicroelectronics and Michaël Peeters of NXP.

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