Slashdot Mirror
NIST Opens Competition for a New Hash Algorithm
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology has opened a public competition for the development of a new cryptographic hash algorithm, which will be called Secure Hash Algorithm-3 (SHA-3), and will augment the current algorithms specified in the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-2. This is in response to serious attacks reported in recent years against cryptographic hash algorithms, including SHA-1, and because SHA-1 and the SHA-2 family share a similar design. Submissions are being accepted through October 2008, and the competition timeline indicates that a winner will be announced in 2012."
i prefer the bubble bag method for making hash
Why does the government promote creating new encryption methods when encrypting data so clearly means you have something to hide and are therefore guilty? I mean COME ON!
I got a catholic block.
Or even worse build a standard based on their work where there are very specific weaknesses built in- you know to fight ""terrorism""
Once I develope the winning uber hash function, what do I get? I can't find in the timeline where it mentions a large cash prize with strippers jumping out of cake. Some balloons too.
Where is the link in the story to this part? Anyone?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
what fragment of that sentance? There's a subject, main verb, helper verbs and objects!
Maybe you didn't mean fragment, but I don't know what a phragment is...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
This is
in response to serious attacks reported in recent years against cryptographic hash algorithms, including SHA-1
and
because SHA-1 and the SHA-2 family share a similar design.
You won't catch me defending this abomination of a sentence, but that's how I'd parse such a thing.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Jung qb V jva?
What would happen if you wrote a program to randomly create algorithms? Most of them would be rubbish, but occasionally you'd hit gold. It must be possible for computers to create formulas that "add up" - i.e. that work?
Get your own free personal location tracker
Encryption implies that you can reconstruct the original string from the encoded. Methods like md5, sha1, etc are one way algorithms that cannot be reversed* in a realistic amount of time.
* - Rainbow tables
Wah Sig!
Democratic version: Note, I'm l[L]ibertarian, and find the humor in parent post.
1. Declare war on Social Ill Y with a bogus slogan "_______ Crisis"
2. Announce increase in taxes and/or entitlement spending
3. Repeat 2 as often as necessary for the domestic brain dead.
4. Use to increase political power locally and abroad by showing how "enlightened" you are.
5. Profit!
6. We all lose.
Cheers,
Hillary Roddam C.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
http://xkcd.com/257/
Not to mention that I sincerely doubt that anyone is currently using some super-secret ultra-elite hashing algorithm that no one else knows about. This field of mathematics and security is quite mature and very much open to scrutiny currently. The current solutions are fully documented. I think the point here is that further progress isn't going to be made by lone researchers hiding their results: the only way forward is via more open collaboration. What better way to get the methods than to have a 'competition', something that will stroke the egos of crackers? If a cracker wants to sell his secrets at the cost of an ego-stroke, that's his choice. Nothing nefarious here. Again, NIST is not going to take these results and use them for evil ends (or even for commercial gain): they are hoping to create an open, public standard that everyone will benefit from (and which international experts in mathematics, cryptography, and computer security will analyze in detail). That's what NIST does.
Sorry, but I think your paranoia is unfounded in this case!
(Disclosure: I work with NIST, but have nothing to do with this project. Note that my opinions are my own and should not be construed as official statements from NIST.)
All right, the first to make a rot13 joke is going straight to hell.
And I don't know what a sentance is either.
:)
If you're going to be a grammar Nazi, at least spell-check your post
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
I put a SHA-1 based KDF in 802.16 because NIST SP800-56 told me to.
Argh.
Evil people are out to get you.
With hash values getting longer and longer, wouldn't it be more economic to just use Identity as the hashing function?
Here's your grain of salt...
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
As you've admitted to being a libertarian, I suppose I should make one for you, too:
1. Declare war on Big Government with bogus slogan "Let the free market fix __________"
2. Announce plans to decrease funding to social programs
3. Figure out that you have no one in any elected office in any country anywhere who can carry out 2.
4. Announce that someone who has never professed to be a libertarian but holds a few libertarian ideals, is in fact a libertarian. Do the same for historical figures, especially anarchists.
5. Make up bogus arguments about the magical free market that will never be put to any sort of test, due to 3., above.
6. Parrot back tired arguments that were disproved hundreds of years ago, back in the days of lassez-faire. Conveniently forget about child labor, horrid working conditions, rampant pollution, institutionalized racism, debt slavery, and any other facts that show unregulated free market capitalism destroys lives.
7. Cherry pick examples of deregulation and privatization, ignoring any cases that prove libertarian methods wrong.
8. Try to convince other libertarians to all move to the same state so you can remedy point 2.
9. Realize that convincing self-centered libertarians to do anything is like trying to herd cats.
10. The rest of us grow bored with your childish, self involved, "Nyah nyah, you're not the boss of me!" political stance and ignore you, as libertarians have never managed to do anything more than talk.
Wait, that's not funny, it's just sad.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There is such a thing as a one-way encryption and hashing is a form of doing so. By definition encryption is the act of writing something in an alternative manner. There's no requirement it be decryptable (or secure, for that matter).
That's why you'll see even the authors of cryptosystems that lost to AES recommending AES. In some cases, the losers are theoretically more secure. However what they are not is more tested. AES is probably the most tested cryptosystem next to DES. As such, people are pretty sure there aren't any lurking holes.
> It should probably be based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography . Unless they want something that only they can break. :O
That would be for signatures, not hashes.
Evil people are out to get you.
Also done by NIST. I suppose you could be all paranoid and claim that AES was chosen so the that US government could snoop on you since, after all, the NSA signed off on it as being secure and they'd never tell the truth, right? Well, except for the fact that it was designed by a couple of Belgians and has also been signed off on by essentially every other respected crypto expert and organization there is.
So that leaves you with two possible situations:
1) That the NSA is so amazingly far ahead of everyone else in crypto that they were able to find something in AES that no one else has in over a decade. Also they are so confident in their knowledge that they believe nobody else will find it since if they did the results would be a big problem (AES is approved for classified data, and is used by US financial institutions).
or
2) AES is really secure, and the NSA is telling the truth.
Now which is more likely? Also, supposing you believe option #1 then why trust any crypto? If the NSA really is so good that they can outdo the entire rest of the crypto community, well then they can probably break pretty much any of the cryptosystems out there. You can't trust any of them since the only people who would really know if they were insecure won't say.
Seems extremely unlikely.
Well, same deal with this hash competition. If you believe that the government will be able to pick one that is in fact something they can break, but that nobody else in the world will know about this then it doesn't matter, because their understanding is so far advanced that all hashes would have to be suspect.
Given the extremely public, international, nature of things like this there really isn't any room for mistrust. I again point to the results of the AES competition. You want to talk about a cypher that has stood up to some extreme scrutiny, there you go.
part of the reason for the long delay is to allow the CIA and NSA to evaluate all contenders for suitability of being crackable/backdoorable by them.
> This is in response to serious attacks reported in recent years against cryptographic ...to follow in early 2013 with a competition to develop SHA-4.
> hash algorithms, including SHA-1, and because SHA-1 and the SHA-2 family share a
> similar design. Submissions are being accepted through October 2008, and the competition timeline
> indicates that a winner will be announced in 2012
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHIRLPOOL
It would also be heavily patent encumbered.
So, what requirements should a submission fulfill? I can't find them!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Even if that were plausible, it'd definitely be a risk worth taking. Cryptographic methods that are kept secret are never as secure as methods that are scrutinised by thousands of cryptanalysts around the world, as even the NSA itself has experienced on more than one occasion. Cryptographers, more than anyone else, are very much aware of the fact that security through obscurity just doesn't work.
First off, Touche. I love a good ribbing ... :-D
1) Never been tried.
2) What's wrong with this?
3) Sad, isn't it?
4) Huh?
5) Again haven't been tried in a while
6) I actually believe GVMT Roll in some of these things
7) No Cherry Picking here
8) Whatever
9) Whatever
10) Too many people being (D) or (R) because of Fear and Fear.
Lets just deal with #1
Free Markets are easy to control. Corporate Charters are given by the GVMT, why aren't they revoked more often? Why aren't assets seized? Why aren't boards of directors arrested and charged for lack of proper stewardship?
Much of the problems seen in the free market isn't the fault of free markets. It is the fault of interference when it isn't needed, and non-interference when it is needed. Indeed, there hasn't really been a "free market" in 150 years or so. Closest we have right now is the Internet, and with Congress getting involved it's only going to ruin it.
We don't need more laws, we need more responsibility.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You are being paranoid.
It's actually IMPORTANT to open the algorithm. An open algorithm is open to analysis for how well it performs its job, and for any bugs or short-circuits, any methods of recovering the input data from the hash. It's provably secure or insecure. You can analyze an open hash algorithm mathematically to determine how likely it is that two given input data items will evaluate to the same hash.
With a closed algorithm, you can't perform this analysis. In the related discipline of encryption, this has tainted the reputation of the closed-algorithm Skype uses for its VOIP encryption. Skype can say its encryption is secure and free of backdoors all day long, but you'd be well advised not to believe this if its algorithm is not open for inspection.
An open algorithm is ONLY secure if an attacker can know the entire algorithm and STILL not turn the hash back into the input data or engineer a hash collision in a reasonable amount of time even with, say, a huge bot farm. A closed algorithm may have any number of compromises, may not be secure in any real sense. The closed algorithm is protected only by the thin veil of obscurity.
This reminds me of an altogether disturbing (yet somehow hilarious) hash recipe that recently came into the public eye - butthash - yeah you heard right. Butthash.
This is what entropy is for.
I've got one mod point left but I can't seem to find the "paranoid" option in the drop-down box here..
"Is that dad? Either that or Batman's really let himself go."
The typewriter cabal.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
Admitting you have a problem is the first step ...
Seriously, though, while your suspicion of their motives is not entirely unfounded, this probably won't help them crack anything. The best thing about a good encryption algorithm is that just knowing the algorithm isn't enough to allow you to crack it.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Oh, I see. You're a smart libertarian who can take a joke. Even rarer than a Unicorn. ;-)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
But if he was critiquing the misspelled word, wouldn't that make him a spelling Nazi?
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
What?
Ha! More anti-establishment mathematician music on Slashdot!
I'll I got to say is...
SHA right!
The timeline which is being linked to starts in 2006. But it is still not too late to get started developing a new algorithm, the submission deadline is a year from now. I guess people with the required skills have probably known about it for a while though, so anybody who intend to submit something is probably already working on it.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Oh c'mon!!!
MOD this up it's funny.
Not *exactly* the same..
I'm still hunting for the document saying it's deprecated for hashing but it's fine as a PRNG. It's in there somewhere.
Evil people are out to get you.
I have a patent.
cpeterso
After reading about the MD5 and SHA vulnerabilities, I've been looking to Tiger as a hash algorithm. Anyone else have experience with it?
:)
Let the "You should really check out the new Leopard algorithm" jokes fly..
ctrl+f "$" Not interested.
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
And there's evidence that the NSA understood quite a bit more about cryptography back in the DES days based on a change they made ot it that hardened it against an as of yet unknown kind of attack.
However being a bit ahead in terms of creating a system is real different form being far enough ahead to break systems. To mistrust the NSA on AES means you figure that they know enough to know how to break it, and that they figure the knowledge is so far advanced that no one else will figure it out. One of the NSA's jobs is actually "To achieve information assurance for information infrastructures critical to U.S. national security interests." They are tasked with things like making sure that US financial systems aren't broken in to, hence things like DES/AES. As such if they knowingly allowed a breakable cryptosystem to become the standard and it was in fact broken, they'd have failed in that and have shit to answer for.
So while I certainly believe they are the best in the business, and while I'd not be surprised to discover they know things that public does not, it would imply a staggering advance in cryptography for them to be able to break AES and figure that the public can't. In fact, it would probably imply something along the Tom Clancy lines of a computer that could break ANY machine based cypher and as such no matter what crypto you used short of a one time pad, you'd be screwed.
I just don't find it reasonable to believe that. I find it more reasonable to believe that since good crypto is out there anyhow, and since their job is to protect US interests, that they did an honest analysis of AES and found it to be highly secure, just as everyone else did.
How about we just add more bits ? :P
(no, I'm not serious!)
In the many years since I've been writing code (and I started on an Atari 400!), I've always sided with caution when dealing with outside-interfacing code. CRC-16 was easy to smash, then CRC-32 lasted just a teeny bit longer, then MD5 collisions, and now SHA-1/2. The one thing about computing power is that it is constantly growing; the hash that protects you today will be a script kiddie's joke tomorrow.
There is one thing that can throw them for a loop: combinations. It's a heck of a lot harder to reverse three interlocked hashes... you might be able to fudge one, but the other one (or two, three, ten) will trip. It also spreads the risk of weaknesses in the individual algorithms.
Now I'm not negating the need for a better hash, but there are very functional things we can do in the meantime to cover our asses.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The linked NIST report mentions only the work of Prof. Yang with which no one has yet found a collision, but a team from Graz University of Technology (Austria) has proposed a significantly faster algorithm for producing SHA-1 collisions and is running a BOINC project to find one.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
You are also being stupid. A good method of securing things is one that they cannot break even with knowing the method. So it makes no difference if they do know it.
Having been rude enough to suggest you are being stupid I see a valid point if you meant they are attempting to get some of the methods used by bad guys out into the open, because currently they have no clue what they are as the first stage in looking for vulnerabilities.
But to me it sounds far too like a TV, genius bad guys out there that have invented encryption strategies vastly superior to anyone else. In which case they aren't so smart if they come out and let people have it instead of just sitting there watching the protected data of the banking system whilst passing around their own inside information?
They never were formatted with two spaces, or at least never should have been. Most browsers automatically reduce two spaces to one in any case.
With a proportinal-width font, you are supposed to use one space after a period (sometimes auto-kerned to 1.5 spaces in higher-end software). With a mono-spaced font, you use two spaces. I used to run the IT shop at a newspaper, and I was quickly elnightened that "single space after full stop" was the way things have always been done by everyone in the publishing industry, going back to the days of mechanical type in the 1800s. Why? Because it looks better on the page.
This seems to support my experience. As most web fonts are proportional-width, a single space after period would seem to be the correct usage.
There are already good hash functions out there that don't share the basic design of SHA. I've been using whirlpool for applications where security is important. (Good old md5 is fine for applications that don't involve security.) The problem is getting these newer hash functions widely implemented. For instance, here is my request to get the perl Digest::Whirlpool module packaged for debian/ubuntu. Until better hashes are conveniently packaged, authors of applications actually have a disincentive to move to more secure hash functions.
Find free books.
Just get 1000 monkeys and 1000 numeric keypads. Where's my prize?
Quick, someone invent hyperbolic encryption! I think I've already seen that used here on slashdot to encode comments. Oh no wait, that's hyperbole...
Recently I was asked to provide some info about the quality of a PRNG generator used in one of our programs.
One of the questions was how well it does on the NIST Statistical Test Suite.
So, I head over to the NIST site and download the latest version for Windows, dated March 22, 2005.
First thing that I notice is that it does not compile under Visual Studio 2005.
OK, I understand, they only had about two and a half years to fix this which is obviously not enough for an organization of their size and with their budget. Never mind, let's see what I can do.
Add some missing #include statements, comment out a test function that passes a string instead of a pointer to structure, fix some implicit ints, add some casts to remove ambiguity in calling math functions and everything seems in order.
Or is it?
It crashes on every run. Debugging time...
The code looks like a horrible mix of MFC C++ and C written by a FORTRAN programmer doing an assignment for the dailyWTF.
Gems like followed by Zero termination anyone? Nah... Let's overflow the buffer for real! Or how about followed by when generatorDir[option] is hardcoded to be "AlgorithmTesting"? Try counting the characters.
Or this allocation and the following access Remember boys and girls, C arrays are zero based.
Amazing!
NIST proudly proclaims that "This software was developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology by employees of the Federal Government in the course of their official duties".
At least they have the decency to add that "NIST assumes no responsibility whatsoever for its use by other parties, and makes no guarantees, expressed or implied, about its quality, reliability, or any other characteristic."