Guido Bertoni
More info
- Affiliation
- STMicroelectronics
- Known for
- Keccak (SHA-3), the sponge construction
Italian cryptographer and one of the four designers of Keccak, the hash function that won the SHA-3 competition.
Bertoni was working on hardware-oriented cryptography at STMicroelectronics when, in 2007, he, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters and Gilles Van Assche described the sponge construction: an internal state that "absorbs" input block by block and is then "squeezed" for as much output as needed. It broke with the Merkle–Damgård design behind MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-2, and is immune to length-extension attacks by construction.
Keccak, built on that idea, was selected by NIST in October 2012 and standardised in 2015 as SHA-3 in FIPS 202. The team has kept working in the same vein, including the faster KangarooTwelve. Having one of the four in industry rather than academia shows in the design: Keccak is unusually cheap in silicon.