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).

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.

Re:faster??

[parlancex]

Does git seriously use SHA1 for file integrity verification? Different hashes are for different purposes. The CRC class of hash functions actually makes certain statistical guarantees for the longest run of possible errant bytes in source data and are extremely faster, making them far more suitable for file integrity checks.