Round 3 (1/31/2011-10/2/2012)

NIST announced five SHA-3 finalists - BLAKE, Grøstl, JH, Keccak, and Skein in an email to the hash-forum listserv on December 9, 2010. The final submission packages were posted for public review on January 31, 2011, which started the third and final round of the SHA-3 competition. A year was allocated for the public review of these finalists.

NIST hosted a Third SHA-3 Candidate Conference in Washington, D.C. on March 22-23, 2012 to discuss the security and performance analyses of the finalists. NIST received an enormous amount of feedback from the cryptographic community both before and after the conference. Based on the public feedback and internal review of the candidates, NIST announced Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition on October 2, 2012, and ended the five-year competition.

A report on the final round of the competition is available here.