Communications of the ACM
Cryptographers Chosen to Duke It Out in Final Fight
A competition to find a replacement for one of the gold-standard computer security algorithms used in almost all secure, online transactions just heated up.
The list of possibilities for Secure Hash Algorithm-3, or SHA-3, has been narrowed down to five finalists. They now face the onslaught of an international community of "cryptanalysts" – who will analyse the algorithms for weaknesses – before just one is due to be selected as the winner in 2012.
The competition, which is being run by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, is a huge deal for cryptographers and cryptanalysts alike. "These are incredibly competitive people. They just love this," says William Burr of NIST. "It's almost too much fun. For us, it's a lot of work."
From New Scientist
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