Abstract

In the last seven years we have witnessed a surge in the cryptanalysis of hash functions. The most visible result was the cryptanalysis of MD5 and SHA -1 by Wang et al., but there have been other results including multi-collision attacks, long message second preimage attacks, and rebound attacks. There has also been substantial progress in understanding security definitions and models (e.g. indifferentiability) and a large number of security reductions has been proven. In 2007, NIST has launched the call for the SHA -3 competition. In 2008 more than 60 submissions were received, which makes this the largest open cryptographic competition to date. In this talk we will discuss the impact of the research on hash functions on practice and the interaction between theory and practice in the SHA -3 competition.