Re: [OPSEC] minutes part 2

On  23 Dec 2008, at 13:06, Vishwas Manral wrote:
> I am not trying to disseminate news here. The aim was to show that the
> link which has been updated 2 months back states the uses of SHA-2,
> etc is safe for hashing purposes.

NIST's Policy on Hash Functions
<http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/policy.html>

This says precisely that:

"The SHA-2 family of hash functions may be used by Federal agencies
for all applications using secure hash algorithms."

This is a statement of policy, granting permission to Federal
agencies.  It does not say that they are "safe", just that they
"may be used by Federal agencies".

It then follows with another policy statement urging non-use
of SHA-1:

"Federal agencies should stop using SHA-1 for digital signatures,
digital time stamping, and other applications that require
collision resistance as soon as practical..."

Note that neither the NIST policy (URL above), nor the other
NIST statements (2 URLs next) say that SHA-2 is "safe".
In fact, the word "safe" doesn't appear at any of those URLs,
as near as my web browser can tell.

>> [1]<http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/index.html>
>> [2]<http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/documents/shs/NISTHashComments-final.pdf 
>> >

These 2 URLs above say that SHA has "serious attacks" and also
that NIST is actively working to replace the current SHA algorithms.

Earlier today, I provided a URL to NIST's list of candidates
to replace SHA, which shows that work to be well underway.

So far, the NIST documents you are citing support my statements.
There are several URLs above.  I'd encourage list members
to go read them for themselves. :-)

Cheers,

Ran

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