America's Next Top Hash Function Begins
Bruce Schneier at Wired - The National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, is holding a competition to pick the next hash function, SHA-3. I'm using SHA1 for Trubanc, mostly because I know it will be available in every PHP implementation, and just about any other programming language. One of the SHA-2 algorithms would probably have been a better choice, from a security perspective, but given the structured form of my hashed data, I doubt that SHA1's weakness against collision attacks is going to be a real problem. [ilo]
NIST has stated that the goal of this process is not to choose the best standard but to choose a good standard. I think that's smart; in this process, the best is the enemy of the good. While there's no rush to choose a new standard -- the SHA-2 algorithms will remain secure for the foreseeable future -- we don't want to analyze the candidates forever.
Personally, I was part of a group of eight cryptographers that submitted Skein to the competition. A decade ago, writing Twofish and participating in the AES process was the most fun I had ever had in cryptography. These next few years promise to be even more fun.
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