Status Report on the First Round of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) opened a public competition on November 2, 2007 to develop a new cryptographic hash algorithm – SHA-3, which will augment the hash algorithms currently specified in the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-3, Secure Hash Standard. The competition was NIST’s response to advances in the cryptanalysis of hash algorithms. NIST received sixty-four submissions in October 2008, and selected fifty-one candidate algorithms as the first-round candidates on December 10, 2008, and fourteen as the second-round candidates on July 24, 2009. One year was allocated for the public review of the second-round candidates. On December 9, 2010, NIST announced five SHA-3 finalists to advance to the third (and final) round of the competition. This report summarizes the evaluation and selection of the five finalists – BLAKE, Grostl, JH, Keccak and Skein.