We are very proud to announce that NIST selected Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 competition!

It was a pleasure to participate to the competition. Being confronted with ideas from a wide diversity of designs was especially exciting. Beyond the design itself, it was also very interesting to cover several domains, from cryptanalysis to software and hardware implementation aspects.

This success comes also with input from a large number of people and we would like to take this occasion to thank them. We start by thanking those who took the trouble to cryptanalyze Keccak and publish the results, in particular Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Dan Bernstein, Christina Boura, Anne Canteaut, Christophe De Cannière, Itai Dinur, Ming Duan, Alexandre Duc, Orr Dunkelman, Danilo Gligoroski, Jian Guo, Dmitry Khovratovich, Xuejia Lai, Joel Lathrop, Willi Meier, Paweł Morawiecki, María Naya-Plasencia, Rune Steinsmo Ødegård, Thomas Peyrin, Andrea Röck, Adi Shamir, Marian Srebrny and Lei Wei, as well as those who cryptanalyzed its predecessor RadioGatún and thereby gave us the motivation to improve it, namely, Charles Bouillaguet, Pierre-Alain Fouque, Thomas Fuhr, Dmitry Khovratovich and Thomas Peyrin. We thank Elena Andreeva, Bart Mennink, Bart Preneel and Marjan Škrobot for tackling the delicate task of bringing clarity in the soundness properties of the modes of use employed by the SHA-3 (semi-)finalists. In the implementation and benchmarking department, we would like to thank the very valuable software benchmarking initiatives eBASH, ran by Dan Bernstein and Tanja Lange for Ecrypt II, and XBX, ran by Christian Wenzel-Benner, Jens Gräf, John Pham and Jens-Peter Kaps; the several teams that performed hardware comparisons, in particular the teams led or represented by Abdulkadir Akın, Brian Baldwin, Kris Gaj, Frank Gurkaynak, Jens-Peter Kaps, Shin’ichiro Matsuo, Patrick Schaumont, François-Xavier Standaert and Stefan Tillich. Of the people who contributed to some specific implementation of Keccak, we would like to thank Nuray At, Renaud Bauvin, Begül Bilgin, Joppe Bos, Alfonso De Gregorio, Christopher Drost, Paul Fontaine, Julien Francq, Christian Hanser, Stefan Heyse and team, Gerhard Hoffmann, Elif Bilge Kavun, Paris Kitsos, Christos Koulamas, Kashif Latif and team, Daniel Otte, Thomas Pornin, George Provelengios, Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen, İsmail San, Nicolas Sklavos, Peter Schwabe, Guillaume Sevestre, Joachim Strömbergson, Tolga Yalcin, Bo-Yin Yang and Shang-Yi Yang. A special mention goes to Bernhard Jungk for his particularly inventive small footprint FGPA implementation and our dear ST colleague Ronny Van Keer for his impressive contribution to optimize Keccak on several CPUs. Keccak can be used in keyed modes and in circumstances where protection against differential power analysis (DPA) is important. In this respect we would like to thank Svetla Nikova, Vincent Rijmen and Martin Schläffer for proposing a method that achieves this and Nicolas Debande and Thanh-Ha Le for helping us analyze this method. We would like to thank the members of the other SHA-3 candidate teams and the participants of the workshops that took place in the last six years for the many interesting discussions, and we thank explicitly Dan Bernstein, Alex Biryukov, Andrej Bogdanov, Christophe De Cannière, Praveen Gauravaram, Sebastiaan Indesteeghe, Nuutti Kotivuori, Marko Krause, Tanja Lange, Pierre-Yvan Liardet, Stefan Lucks, Florian Mendel, Christian Rechberger, Francesco Regazzoni, Vincent Rijmen, Tom Ristenpart, Tom Shrimpton, Yannick Teglia and Elmar Tischhauser. Our thanks also go to the partners of the Ecrypt II Network of Excellence that greatly contributed to the SHA-3 process by providing a platform for keeping track of cryptanalysis of the SHA-3 candidates on the SHA-3 Zoo and bringing researchers together in a series of workshops, retreats and summer schools. Additionally, we thank Alex Biryukov, Stefan Lucks and Frederik Armknecht for organizing the ESC and Dagstuhl seminars that likewise stimulated interaction between cryptographers, as well as all the people we forgot to mention…

Of course we also insist on thanking our colleagues at ST Zaventem, Agrate and Rousset and NXP Haasrode for supporting us, more particularly our managers Yves Moulart, Armand Linkens, Bernard Kasser, Stefan De Troch, Lars Reger and Marc Vauclair, and for kindly sponsoring several hardware platforms that we used to evaluate Keccak. A major part of the effort that went into Keccak was funded by the Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie (IWT), so we thank them for their trust and support. And last but not least, we want to thank the NIST team for organizing the SHA-3 competition and bringing it to a successful conclusion.

But the work is not completely done yet! For Keccak to achieve security assurance, it is vital that third-party cryptanalysis continues. So we invite all young and experienced cryptanalysts to ignore our security arguments and boldly attack Keccak as if your life depended on it. You can actually make some (symbolic) money by breaking open challenges in the Keccak Crunchy Crypto Contest.