SHA-3 was developed by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters and Gilles Van Assche under the name Keccak.
In 2004, there were several breakthroughs in attacks against hash functions that were widely used at the time, such as MD5 and SHA-1. If SHA-2 also proved to be compromised or insecure, there would be no standardized cryptological hash function available that was recognized as secure. Therefore, it was decided to create a new standard that would take into account current research and be more future-proof than SHA-2.
Keccak won the SHA-3 competition in 2012 and was standardized as SHA-3 on August 5, 2015.
With the standardization, the following versions were released:
- SHA3-224
- SHA3-256
- SHA3-384
- SHA3-512