# Tag Info

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First, you're taking the question backwards. Inertia is the default position. You shouldn't be looking for reasons not to switch, but for reasons to switch. If there are no strong reasons to switch, nobody will switch. Security is not a reason. Between SHA-2 and SHA3, there is no reason to believe that one is more secure than the other. It isn't like when ...

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(Disclosure: I'm one of the authors of BLAKE2, but not BLAKE.) Here are the slides from a presentation I gave at Applied Cryptography and Network Security 2013 about this. (Note: the performance numbers in those slides are obsolete — BLAKE2 is even faster now than it was then.) The slides include quotes from NIST's 3rd-round Report on the SHA-3 Competition ...

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Everything was changed between SHA-2 and SHA-3. In the specific case of the "length extension attack": the issue is that SHA-2 process data by splitting it into elementary blocks (64 or 128 bytes, depending on the SHA-2 variant), and produces for each block an output which has exactly the same size as the function output. Moreover, the output for a complete ...

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Well, cryptographers have been contemplating a post-quantum world for some time now. Quantum computing, although in its infancy as far as real-life computers go, has been studied in a theoretical sense for a quite a while. Shor's algorithm was published 19 years ago; Grover's, 17 years ago. These are the two most-famous quantum algorithms, I think, but the ...

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Blake-2 was not part of the SHA-3 competition, Blake, its predecessor was. Blake-2 is approx 1.3 to 1.7 times faster than Blake in software, with the advantage best for the 512-bit digests. Performance A software performance comparison between the two SHA-3 finalists shows that Blake is about 3 times faster than Keccak on a modern CPU for a 512-bit hash, ...

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SHA3 is the name of the hash function standard, and the acronym is for 'Secure Hash Algorithm', pretty neutral one saying nothing about the structure. The algorithm itself was originally named Keccak by the developers. After winning the SHA3 competition, Keccak became SHA3.

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After spending more than two weeks reading well over 750 pages while checking the following (PDF) documents… Sponge Functions Cryptographic sponge functions Security Analysis of Extended Sponge Functions Cryptographic Hash Functions: Recent Design Trends and Security Notions On the Implementation Aspects of Sponge-based Authenticated Encryption for ...

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I do worry, but not for the resistance of SHA-3; I worry for its acceptance. Technically, what NIST wants to do is sound. They do want to somehow "break" a traditional rule, which is that a hash function with an output of n bits ought to resist collisions with strength 2n/2, and preimages (first and second) with strength 2n. Instead, NIST wants harmonized ...

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Unless Keccak has structural weaknesses that I am not aware of, the answer is surprisingly neither 128 nor 256! Gilles Brassard, Peter Høyer and Alain Tapp describe a sort of quantum birthday attack in their paper "Quantum Cryptanalysis of Hash and Claw-Free Functions" that effectively works by creating a table of size $\sqrt[3]{2^b}$ (versus the $\sqrt{2^b}... 21 Given that you use the SHA-3 hash (which is resistant against length extension attacks), would you still need to go through that procedure in order to produce a secure MAC? No, you don't need to do that, but you can. Needless to say we'd still use a key, which we prepend or append to the message, but is that sufficient for a MAC? Yes, you can prepend ... 20 … SHA3 (Bouncycastle) constrains me … Bouncycastle offers the NIST approved, fixed, and standardized output lengths of the keccak sponge function. See, when talking about SHA-3, you're talking about those NIST standards. This was built upon the proposed and accepted keccak sponge function. NIST standardized SHA-3 to those lengths (which libs like ... 18 As fgrieu pointed out, the constants are defined in terms of a binary Linear Feedback Shift Register. Because LFSRs can be represented very efficiently using standard logic gates they have been used for pseudorandom number generation computers for decades. They have fallen out of favor for use directly as secure stream ciphers due to advances in ... 18 With all well-regarded hash functions, the bits of the hash all have equal worth: as far as anyone knows (unless they aren't telling), the bits are not correlated. If you take$k$bits of an$n$-bit hash, you get a$k$-bit hash function. Truncating SHA-256 to 255 bits gives you a hash that's almost as good as SHA-256: it has$2^{255}$strength against ... 17 No they did not, the internals and security levels have not been changed from the draft Keccak submission, only the padding rule has changed. The padding change is the only difference, this allows future tree hashing modes as well as the current SHAKE outputs to generate different digests given the same security parameters and message inputs. Up to 4 ... 17 With any$n$bit hash it is possible to: Find preimages with work$2^n$on classical computers and$2^{n/2}$using quantum computers Find collisions with work$2^{n/2}$on classical computers and$2^{n/3}$using quantum computers I want to emphasize that these are generic attacks that always work, no matter which concrete hashfunction is used. Grover's ... 16 As of now I can think of four different applications for XOFs. Note that some change the padding depending on the requested output size and so the outputs are truly unrelated, Skein does this. Signature message hashing. Using an XOF you don't have to rely on ad-hoc constructions for hashing the message in signature schemes to the appropriate size. For ... 15 The Keccak submission says: From the security claim in [12], a PRF constructed using HMAC shall resist a distinguishing attack that requires much fewer than$2^{c/2}$queries and significantly less computation than a pre-image attack. Here,$c$denotes the capacity of the sponge, i.e. the effective size of the internal state in bits. Since HMAC is a ... 15 That's not the same kind of key. Symmetric keys are bunch of bits, such that any sequence of bits of the right size is a possible keys. Such keys are subject to brute force attacks, with cost$2^n$for a$n$-bit key. 128 bits are way beyond that which is brute-forceable today (and tomorrow as well). If a block cipher is "perfect" then enumerating all ... 15 No. That is about as accurate as saying that airplanes are based on motorcycles, because they both have engines. In MD, the input to the hash is converted to a key, which is used by a block cipher to encrypt the initial value, then the entire encrypted value is the hash. In a sponge based hash, the input is XOR'd into the initial value, then the entire ... 15 But for this reason I would argue it’s the most valuable sub-function to study if we are to determine the theoretical time limit of Keccak inversion. That is incorrect as you don't need a time limit to compute$\theta^{-1}$. You are not using the correct representation. As follows are some intuitions of how to efficiently invert$\theta$. I. Quick ... 14 They are all hash functions. Apart from that, they are structurally quite different. The SHA family (SHA-0, SHA-1, and the SHA-2 functions such as SHA-256 and SHA-512) use the Merkle-Damgård construction, around an internal permutation which happens to be an extended Feistel network. Low-level primitives include boolean bitwise operations, and addition over ... 14 Since this question is asking about opinions, it's hard to give the correct answer (alternatively, all possible answers are correct, because they're an opinion). However, my opinion: I believe that there are several aspects contributing to it: Most application designers (that is, the people who use crypto to actually solve a problem) generally don't ... 13 There does appear to be some confusion with point 1. The confusion probably stems from the fact that Keccak has an output size number and a capacity. Output size has little to no effect on security strength. Capacity is what really determines the security strength. So when the post says NIST will only standardize two security levels it is correct (as far as ... 13 NO, you can't ! I will only consider initial_vector_0 and next_block_0. What you have found is this: +---+ | | | | IV0 ---->+ f +----> state | | | | | +---+ | xor +---------> 1111111111...1 0000000000 +---+ | | | ... 13 The main differences between the older SHA-256 of the SHA-2 family of FIPS 180, and the newer SHA3-256 of the SHA-3 family of FIPS 202, are: Resistance to length extension attacks. With SHA-256, given$H(m)$but not$m$, it is easy to find$H(m \mathbin\| m')$for certain suffixes$m'$. Not so with any of the SHA-3 functions. This means, e.g., that$m \...

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2 main reasons: The 2 capacities match the collision resistance of SHA2 for 32-bit (C=256) and 64-bit (C=512) word sizes. Simplicity, having only 2 capacity/rate combinations means that it does not have to be chosen or calculated from the digest size. I have implemented Keccak in software, and forcing only 2 capacities means a lot less code in the absorb/...

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According to J.-P. Aumasson (who's one of the authors of another SHA-3 finalist, BLAKE, and who participated in the cryptanalysis of Keccak), the name "Keccak" is a variant spelling of "Kecak", a type of Balinese dance. So far, that's the most authoritative reference I've been able to come up with. It should be noted that naming crypto primitives after ...

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I went through it, and while this isn't a complete answer, which should shed some light (and note: when I'm talking about $x$, $y$ and $z$, I'm referring to the ranges those indicies can take on; not any specific index) First rule: if $x$ is even, then $\theta$ is invertible. The proof of that is actually fairly elegant; however it's also rather irrelevant ...

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And in which case would it be more interesting to use one or another? So SHA3-$n$ offers $n$ bits of security against preimage and second-preimage attacks and $n/2$ bits of security against collision attacks. On the other side SHAKE-$n$ offers at $n$ bits of security against preimage and second-preimage attacks and also $n$ bits of security against ...

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In early years of hash function design it was unclear how to choose constants (not only initial vectors), and it was widely assumed that the more random they look, the more secure the function is. There is still not much research in this direction. However, there have been several attacks (rotational cryptanalysis, slide attacks, internal difference attacks) ...

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