SHA-3: Keccak, Grøstl, Blake, SHAKE and Skein — The Final Versions

Where Keccak just wiped out all the competition

Researchers in Canada have defined that the SHA-3 method will take longer to crack that the time that the universe has existed. The total time to crack, with some of the best cracking hardware around, is 1⁰²⁹ years or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to crack the hash. But remember, too, Ron Rivest said that RSA was safe for 4 quadrillion years, but the numbers he used could be cracked within days now.

Introduction

Often we have to create a digit fingerprint for data, and a hash signature gives us a value which validates the data. This can be a 128-bit signature (MD5) or a 160-bit signature (SHA-1). Unfortunately both MD5 and SHA-1 have been shown to produce the same hash for different data values. MD5 is the worst at this, and where three photographs are been created which have the same hash signature.

SHA-1 is showing some weaknesses, but it would take a great deal of processing power to actually produce a SHA-1 signatures for an entity. But the weaknesses are there, and the industry worries that with increasing computing power that SHA-1 will be cracked. Thus NIST designed a new hash function for SHA-2, and which has four main hash sizes: 224-bits…