The NIST hash function competition was an open competition held by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a new hash function called SHA-3 to complement the older SHA-1 and SHA-2.
"[2] The competition ended on October 2, 2012, when NIST announced that Keccak would be the new SHA-3 hash algorithm.
Submissions were due October 31, 2008 and the list of candidates accepted for the first round was published on December 9, 2008.
[6] Another conference was held on August 23–24, 2010 (after CRYPTO 2010) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the second-round candidates were discussed.
[8] On October 2, 2012, NIST announced its winner, choosing Keccak, created by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, and Gilles Van Assche of STMicroelectronics and Michaël Peeters of NXP.