Re: Hash Research (was RE: [pki-tc] Bridge CA update?)

[Arshad Noor <arshad.noor@strongauth.com>]

This could be for a couple of reasons, John:
 
1) That this group is focused more on implementation and use of PKIs, whereas hashing might be of greater interest to mathematicians and cryptographers.  This is not to say that these two groups are not interested in PKIs or that this group is not interested in the hashing collision problem.  But speaking for myself as a builder of PKIs, I'm not terribly interested in the composition of the "materials" so long as there is general consensus in the PKI industry about the efficacy of one "material" over another, and that there are other experts focused on finding the right "materials" for constructing these things;

2) That only MD5 has been shown to have collisions, while SHA-1 has not - which is what most PKIs tend to use nowadays.  In any case, as SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512 get implemented in PKI software products and applications, they will become the implementation standard moving further away from the MD5 collision problem.  Now if the Secure Hashing Algorithm itself had problems with it, that might be another matter altogether....

Arshad Noor
StrongAuth, Inc.

 
----- Original Message -----
From: John Messing <jmessing@law-on-line.com>
Date: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 7:14 am
Subject: RE: [pki-tc] Bridge CA update?

> It seems to me that in addition to or in lieu of Bridge analyses, this
> group should consider developments around intentional hash collisions
> and the research being done about them, and the effects upon the 
> futureof digital signatures and PK.
> 
> I may have missed something, but I do not recall the matter even being
> discussed by the group yet.
>