SHA3s

SHA3 is a family of cryptographic hash functions standardized by NIST. It was developed through a public competition that concluded in 2012, with the Keccak algorithm, designed by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, and Gilles Van Assche, being selected as the winner. SHA3 is designed to be a secure alternative to the SHA-1 and SHA-2 families, particularly in light of theoretical weaknesses that have been identified in those older standards.

The core of SHA3 is the Keccak sponge construction. This construction uses a permutation function to process an arbitrary amount of input data in fixed-size blocks, producing a fixed-size output hash. Unlike SHA-1 and SHA-2, which are based on the Merkle–Damgård construction, the sponge construction offers different security properties and resistance to certain types of attacks.

The SHA3 family includes several hash functions with different output lengths, such as SHA3-224, SHA3-256, SHA3-384, and SHA3-512, providing a range of security levels. In addition to the standard SHA3 hashes, the Keccak algorithm also defines SHA3-224, SHA3-256, SHA3-384, and SHA3-512, which are truncated versions of the main SHA3 hashes. SHA3 is increasingly being adopted in various security protocols and applications.