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SHA-3 Standard [pdf]

nvlpubs.nist.gov

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Re: SHA-3 Standard [pdf]

#6

For non-scientists, what does this mean? Is SHA-2 not good anymore? What should I do?

SHA-2 is still dandy - If I understand correctly SHA-3 is in an entirely different family of cryptographic hash functions, so that if/when a problem is discovered with SHA-2 there's another standard approved and ready to go - but that doesn't mean SHA-3 can't be used now.

Re: SHA-3 Standard [pdf]

#7

For non-scientists, what does this mean? Is SHA-2 not good anymore? What should I do?

SHA-2 is fine, and in fact the more conservative choice right now. SHA-3 didn't happen because SHA-2 was threatened.

My current favorite conservative hash choice is SHA512/256, which is the SHA-2 that generates a 512-bit output but truncates it to 256. It gives you the same length extension protection that is the most important feature of SHA-3, and is available in most libraries already.

I have never recommended to anyone that they switch from SHA-2 to SHA-3. I'm actually in "wait and see" mode about SHA-3; there are compelling other hashes available if you want to be ultra-modern about which hash you use.

Re: SHA-3 Standard [pdf]

#9
Whoa, finally! I've been oddly attached to Keccak's story over the years ever since it won the contest. Glad to see SHA-3 finished.

Did NIST make any changes to the algorithm since? From what I can tell it looks like they only made clarifications.

To celebrate, here's a hacked-up keccak-512 implementation in Rust: https://github.com/pshc/keccak (I have yet to check whether it's actually SHA-3.)

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