# Tag Info

65

The risk of collision is only theoretical; it will not happen in practice. Time spent worrying about such a risk of collision is time wasted. Consider that even if you have $2^{90}$ 1MB blocks (that's a billion of billions of billions of blocks -- stored on 1TB hard disks, the disks would make a pile as large of the USA and several kilometers high), risks of ...

37

SHA-512 truncated to 256 bits is as safe as SHA-256 as far as we know. The NIST did basically that with SHA-512/256 introduced March 2012 in FIPS 180-4 (because it is faster than SHA-256 when implemented in software on many 64-bit CPUs). SHA-224 is just as safe as using 224 bits of SHA-256, because that's basically how SHA-224 is constructed. What bits are ...

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Would you use HMAC-SHA1 or HMAC-SHA256 for message authentication? Yes. That is a semi-serious answer; both are very good choices, assuming, of course, that a Message Authentication Code is the appropriate solution (that is, both sides share a secret key), and you don't need extreme speed. How much HMAC-SHA256 is slower than HMAC-SHA1? Those sorts ...

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If taking the first or last bits of a SHA-256 output made any difference, it would be viewed as a serious blow against the security of SHA-256. Right now, no such weakness is known in SHA-256. So, as far as we know, you can use whatever bits you want. If you need a more "administrative" answer, have a look at SHA-224 (also specified in FIPS 180-3). This is ...

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This isn't necessarily unexpected. 32-bit platforms vs 64-bit platforms can make a significant difference, as well as the amount of data you're hashing. $uname -m x86_64$ openssl speed sha256 sha512 The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed. type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes sha256 ...

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SHA-512 has 25% more rounds than SHA-256. On a 64-bit processor each round takes the same amount of operations, yet can process double the data per round, because the instructions process 64-bit words instead of 32-bit words. Therefore, 2 / 1.25 = 1.6, which is how much faster SHA-512 can be under optimal conditions. Of course there is memory overhead, ...

11

If you want to use Skein (one of the SHA-3 candidates) anyway: it has a "mode of operation" (configuration variant) for tree hashing, which works just like your method 2. It does this internally of the operation, as multiple calls of UBI on the individual blocks. This is described in section 3.5.6 of the Skein specification paper (version 1.3). You will ...

11

Actually a tree-based hashing as you describe it (your method 2) somewhat lowers resistance to second preimages. For a hash function with a $n$-bit output, we expect resistance to: collisions up to $2^{n/2}$ effort, second preimages up to $2^{n/2}$, preimages up to $2^n$. "Effort" is here measured in number of invocations of the hash function on a short,...

11

The functions used by SHA-2, called $Ch$ and $Maj$ are defined like this in the standard: $$Ch(x, y, z) = (x \land y) \oplus (\lnot x \land z)$$ $$Maj(x, y, z) = (x \land y) \oplus (x \land z) \oplus (y \land z)$$ However, an equivalent way to define them replaces the XOR with OR, as the standard (pdf) states: Each of the algorithms include $Ch(x, y, ... 10 The risk of collision is only theoretical; it will not happen in practice. Except in one particular instance. The description given implies that this system is going to be some form of de-duplicating filesystem or backup system. For most users, the collision risk is tiny. But, for one particular class of users, there is a much larger risk. Those users ... 10 SHA-256 uses an internal compression function$f$which takes two inputs, of size 512 and 256 bits respectively, and outputs 256 bits. Hashing works like this: Input message$M$is first padded by appending between 129 and 640 bits (inclusive), resulting into a padded message$M'$whose length (in bits) is a multiple of 512.$M'$is split into$n$... 10 Yes, SHA-256 is currently the de facto standard. The "why" is that MD5 and SHA-1 are unsafe and the only algorithm left which has been extensively studied and deployed and which nobody has found a significant attack against is SHA-256. (There is also SHA-512, but people seem to regard it as being overkill.) There is widespread uncertainty about whether ... 10 With the message padding scheme of SHA-2/SHA-256 as it stands (add one 1 bit, a minimal number of 0 bits so that the overall padded message will end on a block boundary, then the original message length over some fixed number of bits), I know no attack enabled by allowing a different IV. However, allowing an arbitrary IV renders ineffective one of the two ... 10 I would use HMAC-SHA256. While poncho's answer that both are secure is reasonable, there are several reasons I would prefer to use SHA-256 as the hash: Attacks only get better. SHA-1 collision resistance is already broken, so it's not impossible that other attacks will also be possible in the future. It allows you to depend on just one hash function, ... 10 The entropy for the output of SHA-256 truncated to its first$128$bits when fed a random$128$-bit input is about$127.173$bit, down from very close to$128$bit before truncation (see final note). The truncation does not halve the entropy, because the halves are not independent. The right line of thought is that SHA-256 truncated to its first$128bits ... 9 Your cipher looks a bit like the output feedback mode of operation for block ciphers. While OFB for block ciphers is considered safe (as long as it is used right), OFB for a hash function like you are using it has the problem that the key is only used at the start, to generate the "initialization vector", not at each step of the algorithm. Thus, as ... 9 First of all, this no block-cipher at all. It's a stream-cipher. Thus you can use every key only once, and you can't use any cipher modes built on block-ciphers. Your scheme is vulnerable to a known plaintext attack. If the attacker knows 32 aligned(or 63 unaligned) bytes of plaintext, he can calculate the state of your cipher: S_i = P_i \oplus C_i $... 9 The Bitcoin mining algorithm can not be simplified by exploiting any weakness in the SHA-2 hashing algorithm with the current state of the art. The problem is manyfold. From the SHA-256 point of view, there is no (partial) preimage search algorithm that applies to the full hash function. Even worse, the attacks that penetrate a fewer number of rounds have ... 9 If you mean exactly as likely, no, because the number of possible hashes is not a multiple of$100$. This is assuming all the hashes are exactly equally likely. You can come very close just by taking$SHA256 hash \pmod {100}$This will be within one part in$\frac {2^{256}}{100}$, which is a very small number. If you want truly equal, check that the hash ... 8 The definitions given in FIPS 180-4 are $$\mathtt{Maj}(x, y, z)=(x∧y)⊕(x∧z)⊕(y∧z)$$ $$\mathtt{Ch}(x,y,z)=(x∧y)⊕(¬x∧z)$$ where$∧$is bitwise AND,$⊕$is bitwise exclusive-OR, and$¬$is bitwise negation. The functions are defined for bit vectors (of 32 bits in case fo SHA-256). I'm positive$\mathtt{Maj}$stands for majority: the result is set according to ... 8 This started as a comment to CodeinChaos's answer, but did not fit. I'm trying to regurgitate, in layman's terms, my understanding of the consequences on$\operatorname{SHA-256d}$of the paper he quotes: Dodis, Y., Ristenpart, T., Steinberger, J., & Tessaro, S. (2012). To Hash or Not to Hash Again? (In) differentiability Results for H2 and HMAC. This ... 8 Some brief thoughts: Shared secret Generation: $$s=E_a(B)=E_b(A)$$ The shared secret is generated by encrypting the other users public key with your private key. This is effectively an ECDH step, which is very reasonable, and one of the key aims of C25519$^{[1]}$. Key Generation: $$s_0=\mathrm{SHA256}(s); s_i=\mathrm{SHA256}(s_{i-1})$$ First, using the ... 8 It is possible to turn a hash function into a stream cipher; there are several methods for that, and the simplest is to compute$h(K||IV||x)$for hash function$h$, initialization vector$IV$, and successive values of a counter$x$. This yields an arbitrarily long sequence of pseudo-random blocks (32 bytes per invocation if$h$is SHA-256). Then XOR that ... 8 The only rule for the key is that it should at least contain 256 bits of randomness. If the key is smaller you may not get the full security of HMAC. Preferably this should be condensed into 32 bytes. What you are talking about is probably the hexadecimal representation of those 32 bytes. If the key is too large it may affect performance and efficiency of ... 7 First let's take care of your encoding related issues: You can't simply say one byte equals one char. You need an encoding to transform between these, where the properties depend on that encoding. When transforming between normal text and bytes, UTF-8 is a good choice. One character will correspond to a variable amount of bytes that way. You'd use this to ... 7 I'll assume that "sha256hmac" designates HMAC using SHA-256 as the underlying hash function. HMAC is used for its intended usage: the first parameter privatekey is a key, I assume random and secret, of fair length (128-bit); the second parameter word is a (possibly public) message; output is a (possibly public) cryptogram. Observing any number of (word, ... 7 SHA-1, SHA-224 and SHA-256 append the bit “1” to the end of the message, followed by k zero bits, where k is the smallest, non-negative solution to the equation l+1+k ≡ 448 mod 512, where l - message length. In second step they use 32-bit words. SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 use different equation: l+1+k ≡ 896 mod 1024 and in 2. step ... 7 Uniformity is a tricky one. SHA-256 (as well as SHA-3 for that matter) follows a heuristic approach. That is, the design is not based on a hardness assumption (for example, the factoring or discrete-log assumption) but on criteria that have only been verified empirically. As such, also the study of uniformity is an empirical study. The development of SHA-1/... 7 Introduction BCrypt is a password-based KDF (far from state-of-the-art, but better than PBKDF2, because BCrypt requires sizable RAM, which greatly increases the cost of hardware-accelerated password search). Bcrypt is based on the blockcipher Blowfish, with the initial processing of the password reminiscent of Blowfish's key preprocessing. Bruce Schneier's ... 7 In computer science, and implementation of crypto, ROTL stands for ROTate Left. ROTL is also noted ROL, or RLNC for Rotate Left No Carry. On a$w$-bit word with bits numbered from$0$, bit number$j$of the input of ROTL with a shift count of$n$goes to bit$j+n\bmod w$of the result;$n=1\$ unless otherwise specified (and is the only value available on ...

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