Commerce Approves NIST Secure Hash Standard

The National Institute of Standards and Technology March 6 announced the Secretary of Commerce’s approval of a secure hash standard to protect federal information (77 Fed. Reg. 13294, 3/6/12). Secure hash algorithms are a modern method of cryptography used to encrypt computer data. The standard is effective March 6.

According to NIST, the standard “specifies secure hash algorithms for computing a condensed representation of electronic data (message).” The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 180-4 updates a previous standard, FIPS 108-3, by providing a procedure for creating an initialization value, adding two additional secure hash algorithms, and ...