Dozens of amateur and professional cryptographers signed up last week for the United States’ first open competition to create a secure algorithm for generating hashes – the digital fingerprints widely used in a variety of security functions. The contest, run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), seeks to find a strong replacement for the current family of hash functions, some of which have been shown to be cryptographically weaker than originally thought. The agency expected at least 40 proposals to be submitted by the Friday, Oct. 31 deadline…
