tl;dr What does "d <= |Z|" mean in the context of bit array manipulations?
As a learning exercise I'm working on an implementation of SHA-3. I am not a cryptography specialist in any way but I have implemented similar algorithms in the past such as MD5 and SHA1, so I am roughly conversant with the kinds of operations that happen in such algorithms.
I have been working through the document "FIPS PUB 202" (freely available as a PDF here: http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.FIPS.202).
I am finding this a hard document to understand but I'm getting near to completing the program and I'm unsure about the meaning of the following line of text in section 4, algorithm 8 (page 19) the SPONGE function...
My problem is with step 9. I do not understand what "|Z|" means in this context.
This algorithm deals with truncating and concatenating an array Z of bits (which could be several hundred bits long) until this condition is met at which point the first "d" bits of Z is returned to the calling function.
- My first thought was that |Z| means "the length of Z in bits", but that would be inconsistent -- they are using "len(...)" for that purpose in steps 1 and 2 (and elsewhere in the document). This is the only place in the document where this "|...|" notation is used.
- I don't think it would mean "Abs(Z)" in the mathematical sense of converting Z to a positive value because the resulting number would be extremely large in almost all cases. Converting Z (effectively a list of random bits) into an integer seems pointless and arbitrary.
- The "|...|" syntax is not mentioned in the glossary section. ("a || b" is mentioned but that's for array concatenation, which this is definitely not).
- I was also a bit puzzled by the use of "<=" in this condition. Why bother to truncate if the length is equal, just return it as it is? Further suggestion that it doesn't mean "length of Z".
So, how should I understand this slightly weird bit of text? I doubt it's a mistake in the document because it's such an important algorithm and will have been stringently vetted by thousands of people much smarter than me.