[Gzz] Choice of hash algorithm: some facts

[hemppah]

Hi,

I found this message from the p2p hackers mailing list. Benja, hopefully
there's something useful in this message :).

-Hermanni

- - -


To: address@hidden
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 15:41:52 -0500
From: Zooko <address@hidden>
Subject: [p2p-hackers] choice of hash algorithm: some facts
Reply-To: address@hidden


Here's a few things I've learned about hash algorithms:

 * NIST has standardized SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512

SHA-1 is a member of the MD4, MD5 family.  The others (collectively known as
SHA-2) are not.

 * NESSIE [1] is considering the following algorithms for standardization:
all
of the NIST ones, plus Whirlpool [2].

Notably, Tiger wasn't proposed for NESSIE, even though Biham (one of the two
authors of Tiger) is participating in NESSIE.  I don't know why Tiger wasn't
proposed for standardization.

 * Whirlpool is based on Rijndael and one of the designers of Whirlpool is
one
of the designers of Rijndael.  The NESSIE project measures Whirlpool as
being a
little faster than SHA-2/512 (36 cycles/byte for Whirlpool, 40 cycles/byte
for
SHA-512) [3].

 * Ross Anderson (the other author of Tiger) gives a high-level overview
of hash
algorithms in his book "Security Engineering".  He describes MD4, MD5, SHA-1,
SHA-256, SHA-512.  He calls these latter two "versions of SHA".  He says
to use
more than 160-bit wide hash functions, and to avoid the "MD series".  He
doesn't
mention that SHA-1 is genetically related to the MD series.

 * I ran the Crypto++ v5 benchmark on my machine.  It shows that my 1.4 GHz
Athlon XP is about twice as fast as Wei Dai's Celeron 850 MHz [4], and
otherwise
shows approximately the same relation between speeds of hash functions:

hash algorithm MB/s
-------------- ----
CRC-32          253
Adler-32        232
MD5             129
HAVAL (pass=3)   86
SHA-1            84
HAVAL (pass=4)   62
RIPE-MD160       51
HAVAL (pass=5)   50
Tiger            47
SHA-256          41
SHA-512          17
MD2               2

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://cryptonessie.org/
[2] http://planeta.terra.com.br/informatica/paulobarreto/WhirlpoolPage.html
[3] "Performance of Optimized Implementations of the NESSIE Primitives,
version 1.0"
    http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/nessie/deliverables/D21-v1.pdf
[4] http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/benchmarks.html