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from the we're-not-really-just-procrastinating-honest! dept.
The Register covers the difficulty of putting SHA-1 crypto algorithm to bed:
The road towards phasing out the ageing SHA-1 crypto hash function is likely to be littered with potholes, security experts warn.
SHA-1 is a hashing (one-way) function that converts information into a shortened "message digest", from which it is impossible to recover the original information. This hashing technique is used in digital signatures, verifying that the contents of software downloads have not been tampered with, and many other cryptographic applications.
The ageing SHA-1 protocol – published in 1995 – is showing its age and is no longer safe from Collision Attacks, a situation where two different blocks of input data throw up the same output hash. This is terminal for a hashing protocol, because it paves the way for hackers to offer manipulated content that carries the same hash value as pukka packets of data.
Certificate bodies and others are beginning to move on from SHA-1 to its replacement, SHA-2. Microsoft announced its intent to deprecate SHA-1 in Nov 2013. More recently, Google joined the push with a decision to make changes in he latest version of its browser, Chrome version 42, so that SHA-1 certificates are flagged up as potentially insecure.
Just updating to SHA-2 is not as simple as it might seem, because of compatibility issues with Android and Windows XP. More specifically, Android before 2.3 and XP before SP3 are incompatible with the change (a fuller compatibility matrix maintained by digital certificate firm GlobalSign can be found here).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Friday May 01 2015, @09:33AM
The issue right now is that SHA-1 is far from dead even though the writing is on the wall.
We now know how to reduce the complexity involved in forcing a collision so that it is less difficult than brute force, but producing a USEFUL collision remains infeasible so far. Take the sentence "The silly party is the winner" and hash it. A collision like "The very silly party is the winner! Purple monkey dishwasher!" would be useful, but the best we can do is "jujqf8jqwfo238fvlsfw9fgvk" which isn't going to fool anyone.
Further work is likely to change that situation, so SHA-1 needs to be gone before that happens. But if we do it too soon, a lot of things get broken unnecessarily.