

NIST's search for the super hash – just five candidates left in SHA-3 final - adulau
http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/NIST-s-search-for-the-super-hash-just-five-candidates-left-in-SHA-3-final-1151325.html

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harshpotatoes
For a person with only rudimentary knowledge of cryptography, why do they want
a faster algorithm? I was under the impression that slower -> better. Is it
simply that an algorithm that takes 10ms is slow enough to deter brute
forcing, while one that takes 1 second starts to affect the user and possibly
the host?

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ghshephard
Depends on what you are attempting to accomplish. As always, wikipedia has a
great entry on this, and what hash functions are useful for:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function>

You may be confusing storing Passwords, which have gotten a lot of talk from
our local resident cperciva - see <http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_strengthening>.

