NIST has finally opened the competition to determine what will be the new SHA-3 standard hashing algorithm. This is good given the problems that have been discovered with SHA-1 and the fact that the SHA-2 family of algorithms is based on SHA-1. The math for this stuff gets me in over my head pretty quickly, but it is good to see standards bodies working to address these issues. Crypto algorithms have a tendency to be pretty hard to replace once they’re accepted as “standards” so hopefully SHA-3 will hold up for a while.
–Dan
dan _at_ denimgroup.com
