The story of the SHA-3 competition starts with the presentation of surprisingly efficient attacks on several modern hash functions at Eurocrypt 2005 [1, 2] and at Crypto 2005 [3, 4]. Collisions were given for the hash functions MD4, MD5, RIPEMD and SHA-0. An algorithm was shown that can produce collisions for SHA-1 with a complexity that is much lower than previously thought. Before 2005, there were already partial attacks known for several of these hash functions, but only MD4 was really broken [5]. Soon the results were furthere improved and extended to other hash functions. These developments caused NIST to start an effort to develop and standardize a new Secure Hashing Algorithm. This effort was going to be an open competition, similar to the AES competition which it had run from 1998 until 2000.