Schneier is part of the team of cryptographers who created Skein, a family of cryptographic hash functions that has been selected as one of the competition's five finalists.

The idea of standardizing a new hash function came in 2006, when it seemed like the SHA-2 family of functions wouldn't be secure for much longer because of new types of cryptanalysis, Schneier said.

"We didn't know how long the various SHA-2 variants would remain secure," the cryptographer said. "But it's 2012, and SHA-512 is still looking good."

Schneier also favors a "no award" decision at this time because, according to him, none of the SHA-3 final candidates is significantly better than the current standardized hash functions.

"Some are faster, but not orders of magnitude faster," Schneier said. "Some are smaller in hardware, but not orders of magnitude smaller."