Re: NIST publishes new DSA draft

[[e-mail] ("Hal Finney")]

Hi, James - I'm afraid you are off by a year on that.  Those reports
were from 2005, not 2006.  They have been intensively discussed here and
elsewhere in the cryptographic community.  Indeed, those findings are a
good part of why I was proposing making SHA-256 a MUST, along with the
fact that this hash will now be able to be used with DSS signatures.

Hal Finney

> > We might want to think about making SHA-256 be another MUST algorithm.
> > The only MUST hash now is SHA-1.  Making SHA-256 be a MUST would make
> > these new key sizes be more useful, and also give us an easier fallback
> > if SHA-1 should be broken.
>
> SHA-1 was broken, last month by three Chinese cryptographers as reported 
> by Bruce Schneier through is website.  On February 15, 2006 he wrote of 
> a new cryptographic result, an attack faster than brute-force against 
> SHA-1.  Two days later he wrote an update to his original post and a 
> quote from within it:
>
> > Earlier this week, three Chinese cryptographers showed that SHA-1 is not 
> > collision-free. That is, they developed an algorithm for finding collisions
> > faster than brute force.
> > 
> > ...
> > 
> > They can find collisions in SHA-1 in 2^69 calculations, about 2,000 times
> > faster than brute force. Right now, that is just on the far edge of 
> > feasibility with current technology. Two comparable massive computations 
> > illustrate that point.
>
> Reference URL (02/18/2006): http://tinyurl.com/4rl78
> Original post (02/15/2006): http://tinyurl.com/4bmcc
>
> With respect to your suggestion about thinking about making SHA-256 a MUST 
> algorithm I couldn't agree more.
>
> Cheers,
>
> James
>
> -- 
> James Couzens,
> Programmer
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