"When SHA-3 is announced, I'm going to recommend that, unless the improvements are critical to their application, people stick with the tried and true SHA-512," the cryptographer said. "At least for a while."

"I'd say that the world could live without SHA-3, for SHA-1 and SHA-2 resisted cryptanalysis better than expected," said cryptographer Jean-Philippe Aumasson, who designed BLAKE, one of the other five SHA-3 finalist hash functions, Monday via email. "However, I often say that this is due to the 'denial of service attack' of SHA-3: these last years, most cryptanalysts focused on SHA-3 candidates, instead of SHA-1 or SHA-2."

Aumasson believes that SHA-3 will be more secure than SHA-2 in certain aspects and, if Skein or BLAKE will be chosen as a winner, it will also be noticeably faster on the latest desktop and server CPUs from Intel and AMD.

"All the five SHA-3 finalists are believed to satisfy the strongest theoretical security definition, unlike SHA-2," Aumasson said. "However, this does not undermine SHA-2's actual security when used properly."

The fact that the expected attacks against SHA-1 and SHA-2 never materialized is a good thing, but the cryptographic community shouldn't be complacent about it, Matthew D. Green, an assistant research professor who teaches cryptography at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, said Monday via email.