In the SHA-3 contest, 14 of the candidate algorithms have made it to the second round as possible finalists.
I have added an implementation of Blue Midnight Wish (BMW), one of the round 2 algorithms, to the development releases of botan. Only the 512-bit variant is currently supported, since that is much faster on 64 bit processors than the 256-bit hash, and, presumably, at least as secure. BMW is very fast, and actually probably the fastest of all the round 2 candidates. Its design is quite unusual and so it is easily possible that a break in the algorithm will be found at some point, so its current inclusion in botan should be considered as being for evaluation purposes only.
On a 2.4 GHz Core2 Kentsfield, the current implementation clocks in at 315 mebibytes per second, while on a 2.5 GHz PowerPC 970FX I'm seeing around 222 MiB/s. In comparison Skein-512 on the same processors runs at 275 and 202 MiB/s (resp), so about 85%-90% of the throughput of Blue Midnight Wish.
Posted 2009/10/08 in devnotes; no comments
< Incompatible Skein Tweak | Upcoming Improvements to the Python Bindings >