Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

February 20, 2005

SHA-1 Broken by Crytography Team

Filed under: Computer Related — Suramya @ 3:40 AM

I was catching up on all my unread email when I saw an email telling Bugtraq on how the SHA-1 encryption algorithim has been broken by a research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China). These guys have published a semi-private paper describing how they broke the crypto.

Now that even this algorithim is broken, we have to move to a new hash function that is harder to break. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) already has standards for harder-to-break hash functions: SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512. They’re already part of government standards and can be used. Though I don’t know how fast people with switch to the new hashes.

A pretty good introduction to secure hashes is available here to help put all this in context.

Original Story: SHA-1 Broken, Schneier.com

– Suramya

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