An application developer would like to replace Triple DES in their software with a stronger algorithm of the same type. Which of the following should they use?

RC5 is a symmetric block cipher but was never adopted as a NIST standard and is not recognized as a stronger or recommended successor to 3DES.

Triple DES is a symmetric block cipher, and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is also a symmetric block cipher that NIST standardized in 2001 as its direct replacement. AES supports 128-, 192-, and 256-bit key lengths, is computationally more efficient than 3DES's effective 112-bit security, and has no known practical attacks against correctly implemented full-round versions.

RSA is an asymmetric (public-key) algorithm, which is a fundamentally different type of cryptography than 3DES, which is symmetric.

SHA is a cryptographic hash function used for data integrity verification, not an encryption algorithm, so it is not the same type as 3DES.