Allicient

NIST hasn’t even published the complete and proper candidates, but there’s already a full break (second pre-image) of one of the candidate hash algorithms in the SHA-3 competition, pretty exciting, huh?  The “WaMM” hash algorithm is the first to fall, see here for more info.  There’s also been an attack on another of the submissions, EnRUPT.  A list of some (I say some, there’s quite a lot on the list) of the candidates can be found at the SHA-3 zoo.

In this type of process, such a complete break so early on is certainly a good indicator that the process is working as intended – and getting good involvement.  It also serves as a stark warning to those who would use a home-grown crypto scheme in a commercial product without full peer-review of their algorithm, the consequences of which are no less apparent than the failure of the ubiqutous Mifare classic, used for example in the Oyster card in London.

For those who haven’t been following the hype, NIST advertised back in 2007 for submission candidates for a new cryptographic hash algorithm, much in the same vein that the Advanced Encryption Standard process was conducted (the website can be found here). The deadline for submissions is tomorrow, so I thought now would be a good time to upload a copy of my own submission, Sgàil.

A copy of the submission files can be found in the articles and papers section of this website – or even quicker the specification is here.

As with all submissions to the SHA-3 process, its totally royalty free and all that jazz – basically you can do what you like with it. If anyone ever fancies implementing it in real software, I would love to hear about it. Also, if anyone has comments or analysis on the actual algorithm, I may not want to hear them, but they are none-the-less very welcome

UPDATED 22/01/09: The new version, 0.4, of Sgàil is available which corrects a serious error, check the Sgàil page for more details.