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Schneier On the US Crypto Competition

Posted by kdawson on from the ante-up dept.

Bruce Schneier has a commentary in Wired titled An American Idol for Crypto Geeks on the US government's competition for a new cryptographic hash function to become the national standard, covered here recently. He talks about how much the competition, slated to wrap up by 2011, will advance the cryptographic state of the art. And how much fun he expects to have.

2 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Re:SHA-256? by archen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If your algorithm is showing weaknesses, then throwing more bits at the problem is best reserved as a temporary solution. At the worst this competition will just give us an alternative hash algorithm, and that is probably reason enough to have it.

  2. Re:SHA-256? by kestasjk · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Also it's still based on the SHA-1 algorithm that was "broken".
    For practical purposes even SHA-1 is still reasonably safe, but it'd be best to learn from the cryptanalysis and research of almost two decades if we're going to make everyone change their hashing algorithm anyway.

    --
    // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);