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This story is from the category Connectivity
Date posted: 18/11/2008 Cryptographers from around the world have laid their best work on the line in a contest to find a new algorithm that will become a critical part of future communications across the Internet. The winning code will become a building block of a wide variety of Internet protocols, including those used to safeguard communications between banks and their customers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) organized the competition and plans to release a short list of the best entries by the end of this month, beginning a four-year process of painstaking analysis to find the overall winner. All this effort is necessary because the current standard--the Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2)--is starting to show its age. In 2005, Xiaoyun Wang, a professor at the Center for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University, in China, found weaknesses in several related hashing algorithms. Since then, she and her peers in the field have chipped away at other hashing schemes, making officials worry that SHA-2 will also eventually succumb. A hash algorithm turns an ordinary message into a "digital fingerprint," which can then be used to keep the original message secret during transit or to guarantee that it hasn't been tampered with en route. See the full Story via external site: www.technologyreview.com Most recent stories in this category (Connectivity): 01/05/2013: Columbia Engineers Generate World-Record mmWave Output Power from Nanoscale CMOS |
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