WebApp Sec: Re: MD5 math question

[Tim <tim-security () sentinelchicken org>]

> Nopes. Or I bought the propaganda saying "an incorrect implementation of 
> SHA1 has been broken". Shame on me either way. So what are we left with? 
> SHA-<lots-of-numbers-higher-than-1> ?
Ah, yeah... There was some sort of f-up with the implementation.  They
were able to quickly fix that and show that their methods still work
with the real thing.

Well, there's SHA-{224,256,384,512}[1], but those are all built on the
same math as SHA-1.  They are almost surely more difficult to break,
with respect to collisions, than SHA-1, but it's still hard to trust
them.

Some alternatives are Tiger and Whirlpool, but I don't know if these
have had enough scrutiny yet to be trusted.  NIST recently hosted a
workshop[2] on the issues of replacing SHA-1, and they have some
presentation slides online[3] which may be helpful.


cheers,
tim




1. http://csrc.nist.gov/cryptval/shs.htm
2. http://www.csrc.nist.gov/pki/HashWorkshop/index.html
3. http://www.csrc.nist.gov/pki/HashWorkshop/program.htm

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