NIST hash function design competition

[Hal Finney]

I was registering today for the Crypto conference and discovered that
immediately afterwards, and at the same site in Santa Barbara, CA, NIST
is holding a two-day workshop on hash function design.  The information
is here:

http://www.csrc.nist.gov/pki/HashWorkshop/index.html

"In response to the SHA-1 vulnerability that was announced in Feb. 2005,
NIST held a Cryptographic Hash Workshop on Oct. 31-Nov. 1, 2005 to solicit
public input on its cryptographic hash function policy and standards. NIST
continues to recommend a transition from SHA-1 to the larger approved
hash functions (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512). In response
to the workshop, NIST has also decided that it would be prudent in
the long-term to develop an additional hash function through a public
competition, similar to the development process for the block cipher in
the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)."

I had not heard that there had been an official decision to hold a new
competition for hash functions similar to AES.  That is very exciting!
The AES process was one of the most interesting events to have occured
in the last few years in our field.

Seemed like one of the lessons of that effort was that, even though it was
successful in terms of attracting the interest and hard work of some of
the top researchers in the field, in the end we have learned considerably
more about Rijndael's vulnerabilities only after the process was over.
Perhaps the intrinsic difficulty of cryptography makes this kind of outcome
inevitable.  But hopefully the hashing competition will learn from the AES
experience and make sure that it takes as much time as it needs to take.

Hal Finney

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