Slashdot Mirror
Preparing To Migrate Off of SHA-1 In OpenPGP
jamie found a note on debian-administration.org, the first in a promised series on migrating off of SHA-1 in OpenPGP. "Last week at eurocrypt, a small group of researchers announced a fairly serious attack against the SHA-1 digest algorithm, which is used in many cryptosystems, including OpenPGP. The general consensus is that we should be 'moving in an orderly fashion toward the theater exits,' deprecating SHA-1 where possible with an eye toward abandoning it soon (one point of reference: US govt. federal agencies have been directed to cease all reliance on SHA-1 by the end of 2010, and this directive was issued before the latest results). ... So what can you do to help facilitate the move away from SHA-1? I'll outline three steps that current gpg users can do today, and then I'll walk through how to do each one..."
From TFA, so others don't have to read it, GPG will stay with SHA 224, SHA 256, SHA 384 and SHA 512.
Rethinking email
Is there any hash function that actually is secure?
There are some for which no known attacks exist. SHA-256 and SHA-512, Whirlpool and Tiger are all pretty thoroughly-reviewed with no weaknesses uncovered. The NIST hash function competition is causing a great deal of new hash function research and we'll almost certainly get a bunch of great new hash functions out of it -- many of them not only secure, but significantly faster than SHA-1.
If you're thinking that "no known attacks" isn't good enough, keep in mind that's as good as it every gets in cryptography, with the sole exception of the One Time Pad
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That is not what secure means with regard to hash functions. Secure means that it is not feasible to construct a document which has the same hash value as a given document (pre-image attack) or to construct two documents which have the same hash value (collision attack). The complexity of these attacks is ideally such that simply enumerating documents is the fastest way (brute force). Reducing the number of documents which you have to try to find a match makes a successful attack more likely. The complexity which is deemed as breaking the hash function depends on the adversaries and time frames relevant to a particular application.
SHA-1 doesn't encrypt things. It makes a hash of them, to verify they haven't been modified.
There are no secrets encrypted with SHA-1 because SHA-1 doesn't encrypt things.
If you're thinking that "no known attacks" isn't good enough, keep in mind that's as good as it every gets in cryptography
I think my math teacher would call that a "necessary but not sufficient" condition, I mean anything can be without known attacks by virtue of never having been reviewed. Minimums should include:
1. Published algorithm, no "secret sauce" security by obscurity
2. Solid peer reviews by other cryptographers, definately not just the vendor or their hirelings
3. Strong links to well-researched hard mathematical problems
Of course, nothing can guarantee that the NSA hasn't found some super-secret math thingie that'll cut through it like a knife through hot butter. But cryptography is also about eating your own dog food, if you don't use it for anything valuable who'd trust it? You can't really keep that a secret because you have to tell lots of people that this isn't really secure or they'd use it as if it were. And if you do use it for your valuables, would you really leave that kind of backdoor for someone else to find? Again it doesn't prove anything, but I think most modern crypto algorithms have no weaknesses known to anybody, and if one showed up it'd be just as big a OMG for those who made/approved it as everyone else.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This has nothing to do with multiple hash algorithms. What you're referring to is that finding an n-way collision from a 2-way collision is polynomial time. That is, a 2-way collision is two documents with the same hash, and an n-way collision is n documents with the same hash.
Finding a pair of documents that have the same SHA1 hash doesn't help you find a pair of documents with the same MD5 hash. Indeed, none of the efficient-collision algorithms allow you to find collisions in both SHA1 and MD5 simultaneously. (Note that, as far as I know, there aren't even any efficient preimage attacks on MD5 or SHA1, only collision attacks.)
Using multiple hash algorithms is helpful, yes.
Did no one really reply to this?
PGP is the original. Phil Zimmerman, export control, all the history.
OpenPGP is a specification for all input and output of a PGP system. RFC 4880. Diverges from PGP5.
GPG == GNUPG. A Free Software implementation of OpenPGP. Has now become the most commonly used OpenPGP implementation. Werner Koch is the project lead.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.