15-year old vies to build new crypto standard
Fifteen-year-old Peter Schmidt-Nielsen spent only a month working on his submission, but he thinks he's come up with something "unusual and new." Never mind that he's up against some of the most famous cryptographers in the world.
Schmidt-Nielsen is one of more than 60 entrants in what's expected to be a four-year contest to pick a new hashing algorithm that will help lock down the cryptography used by everything from Web-based payment systems to secure e-mail to source-code management tools.
The contest, sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), hopes to find a new cryptographic hash algorithm to replace the SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm - 2) algorithm that NIST published eight years ago. The deadline for SHA-3 submissions was Oct. 31, and NIST hopes to cut the field down to 15 or 20 contestants by next August. That's when the hard work of hammering away at the submissions and knocking loose any flaws will really begin.
