Recently, the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the selection of Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition. This concluded an open competition that was remarkable both for its magnitude and the involvement of the cryptographic community. Public review is of paramount importance to increase the confidence in the new standard and to favor its quick adoption. The SHA-3 competition explicitly took this into account by giving open access to the candidate algorithms and everyone in the cryptographic community could try to break them, compare their performance, or simply give comments.

In this talk the authors of Keccak will introduce and highlight the strengths of their cryptographic primitive and explain how it can benefit to the FOSS community.

Although Keccak, as the SHA-3 standard, will coexist with the current standard SHA-2 hash function family, it is much more than just another "SHAxSUM" algorithm. Keccak relies at its core on a new construction, called the sponge construction, which allows for simpler and more flexible modes of use. The talk will illustrate this by giving various examples on how current software designs can benefit from this greater flexibility, e.g., for all the flavors of hashing, stream encryption, authentication, authenticated encryption and pseudo-random bit generation.

This talk will also focus on the different aspects that make the design of Keccak open, from the open source implementations on various platforms to initiatives to keep encouraging third-party cryptanalysis, such as the KeccakTools cryptanalysis software and the Crunchy Crypto Collision and Pre-image Contest.