New SHA Functions Boost Crypto on 64-bit Chips

An anonymous reader writes: The National Institute of Standards and Technology, guardian of America's cryptography standards, has announced a new extension to the SHA-2 hashing algorithm family that promises to boost performance on modern chips. Announced this week, two new standards — SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 — have been created to directly replace the SHA-224 and SHA-256 standards. They take advantage of the speed improvements inherent in SHA-512 on 64-bit processors to produce checksums more rapidly than their predecessors — but truncate them at a shorter length, reducing the overall timespan and complexity of the digest.