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<HR><H2>[COLD] MD5, SHA1, encryption, etc.</H2>
<H3>daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mon Aug 26 03:02:20 1996
)</H3>
<PRE>
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 1996 23:48:36 -0700
To: coldstuff@cold.org
From: Jon Callas &lt;jon@worldbenders.com&gt;

Hi. I'm Jon Callas, a MU*-hacker for a long time now. I'm setting up a Cold
system, and have been going through mail archives and found the recent
discussion of crypt() etc. and know something about this, because I work
with privacy software.

MD5 and SHA1 are not encryption algorithms. They are "Message Digest"
(that's what MD stands for) "Secure Hash" (that's what the SH stands for)
or "Cryptographic Checksum" algorithms. They are fully exportable (because
they are not encryption algorithms). What they do is to take an arbtrary
amount of binary goo and produce a small checksum that you can be pretty
sure is not like the checksum produced by other bits of binary goo.

They have two properties that make them excellent for doing passwords with.
(1) It is nigh impossible, given a hash, to determine what the source
string was. (2) Although collisions are inevitable, it is nigh impossible
to produce a string S that generates the same hash as a string T. At least
in theory, anyway.

MD5 produces a 128-bit (16-byte) hash. SHA1 produces a 160-bit (20-byte)
hash. MD5 was developed by Ron Rivest at RSADSI and is freely usable as
long as you mumble somewhere that you're using it and that it's copyright
by them. This is in the source code. SHA1 was developed by the NIST in the
US as a better, more robust variant on Rivest's MD family. The
implementation I have was written by Paul Kocher, and is freely
distributable. I use it in all my freeware.

In general, you should use SHA1, but for the purposes of grinding up
passwords, there's no problem with either. Me, for my last product (a
business MU* system called Meeting Space) I used MD5. If I were starting
now, I'd use SHA1, but I'm not so worried about MD5 that I feel the need to
retrofit my old software.

I have implementations of both MD5 and SHA that I'm willing to give out.

I also have a crypt-replacement that I wrote for Meeting Space that uses
MD5 to grind up the password. I'm willing to give this to the ColdX
Project. Heck, I'm even willing to update it to use SHA1.

	Jon



</PRE>
