At some points throughout the competition, the determination criteria used by NIST were somewhat unusual, with the decision committee stating that "We preferre

At some points throughout the competition, the determination criteria used by NIST were somewhat unusual, with the decision committee stating that "We preferred to be conservative about security, and in some cases did not select algorithms with exceptional performance, largely because something about them made us “nervous,” even though we knew of no clear attack against the full algorithm." http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/Round3/documents/Email_Announcing_Finalists.pdf http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/Round3/documents/E... [PDF]