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IT Contest Promotes Steaming Hash

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 01-26-11 | Comments

Five finalists have been chosen in a federally sponsored contest to create the next generation of hash algorithms for IT.

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IT Contest Promotes Steaming Hash
A federally sponsored contest seeks to develop next-generation hash algorithms. One of five new algorithms, chosen from among an original field of 64, will be used for everything from storage access to cryptography�making it a key instrument in the toolbox of modern IT organizations.

Hash algorithms improve data storage access times, provide random number generation, ensure the authenticity of digital documents�from digital signatures to authentication codes�as well as streamline cryptographic applications. The contest winner will augment the hash algorithms currently specified in Federal Information Processing Standards Secure Hash Standard, authorizing a third-generation of Secure Hash Algorithms (called SHA-3).

The hash functions by transforming the content to be stored (here telephone numbers) into index codes that can quickly retrieve that data (source: Wikipedia).

A hash function implements a simple, easy-to-execute algorithm that maps input values (derived from the content to be stored) to an index�called the hash code�that can be used for quick retrieval. Hash tables hold these index values plus the real physical address of the stored data, allowing quick retrieval of documents from the hash table. The bane of hash functions are collisions�data sets that produce the same hash code�which must be gracefully reconciled by the hash algorithm.

The current SHA-3 Cryptography Competition concentrates on security applications of hash functions, which take arbitrary blocks of data and derive a fixed-size index (called a digest). Indexing secure messages with a hash digest aims to satisfy four competing goals: ease of computing the digest, minimizing collisions, guaranteeing that changes in the message will result in a different digest, and guaranteeing that the message cannot be "reverse-engineered" from the digest.

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