Quoting the article Gone in 60 Months or Less:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has disallowed the use of 1024-bit keys after 31 December 2013 because they are insecure. Rapid advances in computational power and cloud computing make it easy for cybercriminals to break 1024-bit keys. When a researcher from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland cracked a 700-bit RSA key in 2007, he estimated that 1024-bit key lengths would be exploitable 5 to 10 years from then. Not even three years later, in 2010, researchers cracked a 1024-bit RSA key.
So, we're talking about a 512-bit "cryptographically secure" hash meeting cipher implementations where 1024-bit keys are not disallowed anymore by the end of thisthe year 2013.
What does that mean for SHA-3, as the NIST submission sets the rate $r$ as 1152, 1088, 832, or 576 (144, 136, 104 and 72 bytes) for 224, 256, 384 and 512-bit hash sizes, respectively? Can we still think about using SHA-3 to hash passwords to the desired bit-length and comply to NIST rules on the long run, or do we need to expect NIST gradually starting to enforce that 1024-bit key rule across all protocols?