"It's probably too late for me to affect the final decision, but I am hoping for 'no award,'" Schneier said Monday in a . "It's not that the new hash functions aren't any good, it's that we don't really need one."

Cryptographic hash functions have many applications in information security and are commonly used to verify data authenticity. Such functions convert a piece of information into a unique, fixed-length bit string, and should make it impossible for two different messages to result in the same string.

For example, user passwords are commonly stored in hashed form inside databases in order to prevent their exposure if the database is compromised. Every time a user attempts to authenticate against an application, a hash is computed for the password he supplies and is compared to the one already stored in the application's database.

NIST announced its public in November 2007 with the goal of finding a new hash algorithm that would be standardized as a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) called SHA-3 (Secure Hash Algorithm 3).

After five years and three selection rounds that reduced the number of candidates from 64 initially submitted functions to only five, NIST is expected to announce the winner sometime this year.