FIPS 180-4 approval

The Secretary of Commerce has approved Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 180-4, Secure Hash Standard (SHS). FIPS 180-4 updates FIPS 180-3 by providing a general procedure for creating an initialization value, adding two additional secure hash algorithms to the Standard (SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256) and removing a restriction that padding must be done before hash computation begins, which was required in FIPS 180-3. FIPS 180-4 is available at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsFIPS.html.