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Ask Slashdot: Is SHA-512 the Way To Go?
crutchy writes "When I was setting up my secure website I got really paranoid about SSL encryption, so I created a certificate using OpenSSL for SHA-512 encryption. I don't know much about SHA (except bits that I can remember from Wikipedia), but I figure that if you're going to go to the trouble (or expense) of setting up SSL, you may as well go for the best you can get, right? Also, what would be the minimum level of encryption required for, say, online banking? I've read about how SHA-1 was 'broken', but from what I can tell it still takes many hours. What is the practical risk to the real internet from this capability? Would a sort of rolling key be a possible next step, where each SSL-encrypted stream has its own private/public key pair generated on the fly, and things like passwords and bank account numbers were broken up and sent in multiple streams with different private/public key pairs? This would of course require more server grunt to generate these keys (or we could take a leaf from Google's book and just have separate server clusters designed solely for that job), but then if computing performance was a limiting factor, the threat to security of these hashes wouldn't be a problem in the first place."
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"I guess with all security infrastructure, trust becomes a more important factor than technical abilities. Can I trust that my SSL provider hasn't been hacked (or at least snooped)? How do I know some disgruntled IT admin hasn't sold the private key of his company's root CA to the same organization that developed the conficker virus? It would certainly make for a more profitable payload. I've read some of Bruce Schneier's work (I'm subscribed to Cryptogram) and he tends to highlight the FUD that surrounds internet security, and I agree that there is a lot of FUD, but complete ignorance and blase attitude toward security can also be taken advantage of. Where is the middle ground?"
First of all, congratulations that you try to take security serious. Even though what I can tell from your questions is that any answer we could give you here would leave you with even more questions and very little enlightenment. A few very good books have already been recommended, and I'd recommend the same that was already said: Go read. Don't implement a security scheme, don't even plan it. Go read the books, teach yourself what's necessary to actually understand what you're doing and then go and plan your security.
On the danger of sounding patronizing, but that's simply as it is. It doesn't matter if you use MD5 or SHA-512 before you understand how to use them in a secure way. I gave the parallel of the steel door with paper walls above, so I won't repeat it, but security is always the security of the weakest part. If someone can bypass your secure entrance, the whole security is voided. I've seen too many rely on a "strong" hash only to see that the algo used was weak and allowed other ways of attacking. I can easily recommend anything Bruce Schneier wrote, he sure is one of the security gurus of our times and his books aren't as dry as many others on the subject. I'd start with the already mentioned "Applied Cryptography".
While we're at it, something I would also highly recommend is to implement a "fail well" strategy. Another thing I've seen many, many times ignored, and it's maybe the easiest way to improve security in a system, especially if the person responsible for it is not a security guru himself. The general idea is that, if (ok, when) security gets broken, the system should not instantly be fully accessible to the perpetrator. Try to compartmentize and contain the damage. Many times it is quite easy to do but ignored for simplicity's sake, like using the same database user (with admin privileges, of course) for different databases or using the same credentials for different systems. It's, IMO, the first step to more security and it can be easily implemented without a lot of knowledge of security because most of it is in the administrative field, not the technical one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you're securing something like THAT, it's very sensible to use algorithms that permit decoys using one key and hiding the real data under an alternative key. Truecrypt does this, for example.
I use SSHA-256 (salted/seeded SHA-256). I haven't even looked at going to 512.
One thing I do, though, is store a prefix to all my hashes denoting the algorithm used. That way if anything better comes along down the road I can start using the better algorithm for new accounts and password changes and will hash user input during login based upon that prefix. That way legacy passwords do not break.
I do not know if I weaken my security by prefixing the hash with something like "{SSHA256}", but I am not one to rely on obscurity for security.