Goodbye SHA-1: NIST Retires 27-Year-Old Widely Used Cryptographic Algorithm

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency within the Department of Commerce, announced Thursday that it's formally retiring the SHA-1 cryptographic algorithm. SHA-1, short for Secure Hash Algorithm 1, is a 27-year-old hash function used in cryptography and has since been deemed broken owing to the risk of collision attacks. While hashes are designed to be

Single-Core CPU Cracked Post-Quantum Encryption Candidate Algorithm in Just an Hour

A late-stage candidate encryption algorithm that was meant to withstand decryption by powerful quantum computers in the future has been trivially cracked by using a computer running Intel Xeon CPU in an hour's time. The algorithm in question is SIKE — short for Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation — which made it to the fourth round of the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization