SHA-3 is there!

NIST has announced the end of the Secure Hash Algorithm competition the day before yesterday, naming Keccak as the winner and making it the SHA-3 algorithm. The complete announcement from NIST is here.

One thing of note is that since the algorithm was developed by STMicroelectronics and NXP Semiconductors, the algorithm is heavily optimized for the use in smart cards. According to the announcements, it is both compact and fast when implemented in hardware. Which makes it once again very well suited to some applications and difficult to use for others (like password hashing).