NIST defines a lot of interesting applications of sponges in FIPS 202 and NIST SP 800-185 like the XOF cSHAKE128 or the MAC scheme KMAC.
All this schemes come with a security guarantee and are explicitly based on a sponge using Keccak as its permutation.
This leads me to two questions:
- Do these constructions really rely on Keccak (apart from minor technical details like the padding length) or can they be adapted to different sponges without loosing security (assuming the alternative sponge function used is secure enough, of course)?
- Are there any papers or standards published, which propose similar constructions which are not dependent on a single sponge instance?