Communications of the ACM
Attacks Hit, but Don't Break, New Sha-3 Candidate
Despite a recently discovered collision attack, the SHA-3 cryptographic tool remains a long way from being broken.
Credit: Shutterstock
A recently discovered collision attack has defeated five rounds of encryption in the SHA-3 implementation, making it the strongest attack yet against the new Secure Hash Algorithm, says cryptographer Adi Shamir. However, since the SHA-3 implementation has 24 rounds of encryption, it is still a long way from being broken, Shamir notes.
A hash algorithm is a cryptographic tool that can create a digest, or string of bits of a specific length, for a digital document. A collision attack is a way of finding two messages that will produce the same hash value, or a hash collision. The SHA-3 implementation relies on the Keccak scheme, which was selected by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to be the new Federal Information Processing Standard for secure hashing.
Shamir says the SHA-3 implementation is a good choice to complement the SHA-2 implementation, which will replace the original SHA-1 algorithm, according to NIST.
From Government Computer News
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found