On October 12, NIST announced Keccak as the winner of its Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-3) competition.
Keccak is designed to permute the data in a different manner than MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-2, making it immune to many of the attacks on those hashes. It promises roughly 13 cycles per byte to process the hash. The hash is limited to using bitwise XOR, AND, NOT, and rotations. It will need up to 1600 bytes of RAM for the hash state, but no lookup tables. It provides arbitrary sized output. Keccak can also perform keyed hashing, by setting the initial state by priming the hash with the key. The algorithm is simple and small, perfect for embedded systems.
If you would be interested in talking about Keccak, SHA-3, and wolfSSL embedded SSL, send an email to info@yassl.com.
1. http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/sha-100212.cfm
2. http://keccak.noekeon.org/