On October 2nd NIST announced that they picked the Keccak
algorithm as the winner of the SHA-3 competition. Thus, the
cryptographic hash function is prepared for future use in a wide
range of applications. Keccak was created by Guido Bertoni, Joan
Daemen, and Gilles Van Assche of STMicroelectronics and Michaël
Peeters of NXP Semiconductors. A cryptographic hash function is
an algorithm that takes a message (usually a string of text or a
binary file) and calculates a fixed size digest, which is
usually represented as a hexadecimal string. Hash functions are
designed in a way that the same input will generate the same
output, but starting with just the output, it is not possible to
calculate the input other than doing a brute force check which
involves trying all possible inputs until you come up with a
suitable candidate. Any hash function that violates this
property, i.e. it is possible to come up with the input
belonging to the hash faster than with a brute force attack is
considered broken by cryptographic