New SHA Functions Boost Crypto On 64-bit Chips

An anonymous reader writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology, guardian of America's cryptography standards, has announced a new extension to the SHA-2 hashing algorithm family that promises to boost performance on modern chips. Announced this week, two new standards — SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 — have been created to directly replace the SHA-224 and SHA-256 standards. They take advantage of the speed improvements inherent in SHA-512 on 64-bit processors to produce checksums more rapidly than their predecessors — but truncate them at a shorter length, reducing the overall timespan and complexity of the digest." Further details are available from NIST (PDF).

Comments

Re:faster??

[sl3xd]

I thought this as well - you'd think being able to compute a hash faster makes it a bit easier to compute a rainbow table with the hash.

Then again, there are many other perfectly reasonable ways you'd want the hash to be faster - for instance, how git uses the sha1 hash throughout - or any hash-summing of a file to verify the contents are unchanged.

So the 'faster hash' really only means that it might be something to consider when using it for a password hash - but for data integrity checking, it can be a real boon.