SHA-3 is a family of cryptographic hash functions, a successor to SHA-2.
SHA-3 is a family of cryptographic hash functions, intended to replace sha1 and sha2.
SHA-3 was chosen by NIST in a competition started in November 2007. The winner was declared to be the Keccak family in October 2012. The other finalists in the competition were BLAKE, Grøstl, JH and Skein skein.
As of October 2012, SHA-3 has not yet been formally codified. It is intended that the next version of FIPS PUB 180 will specify Keccak functions with digest sizes 224, 256, 384, 512.