Re: Password hashing

2007-10-12 Thread james hughes
I forgot to add the links... http://people.redhat.com/drepper/sha-crypt.html http://people.redhat.com/drepper/SHA-crypt.txt On Oct 11, 2007, at 10:19 PM, james hughes wrote: A proposal for a new password hashing based on SHA-256 or SHA-512 has been proposed by RedHat but to my

Avoiding certicom patents.

2007-10-12 Thread James A. Donald
-- Avoiding certicom patents. The two patents that are actually useful are point compression and ECMQV Bodo Moeller, quoted by Bernstein, points out that one can do point compression following the method of page 171 of the Harper-Menezes-Vanstone paper Public-key cryptosystems with very

Re: 307 digit number factored

2007-10-12 Thread James A. Donald
A 307 digit number is 1024 bits, near enough. 1024 bits was scheduled to fail in 2013. It has failed early, due to modest advances in factorization. Thus past comparisons of the strength of encryption key sizes are no longer entirely accurate. Further, they never were that accurate to start

Password hashing

2007-10-12 Thread james hughes
A proposal for a new password hashing based on SHA-256 or SHA-512 has been proposed by RedHat but to my knowledge has not had any rigorous analysis. The motivation for this is to replace MD-5 based password hashing at banks where MD-5 is on the list of do not use algorithms. I would prefer

Re: 307 digit number factored

2007-10-12 Thread James A. Donald
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: AFAIK, the only advantage of ECC is that the keys are shorter. The disadvantage is that it isn't as well studied. Nate Lawson wrote: Again, this is well covered. The reason is the fundamental difference in the performance of the best-known attacks (GNFS vs. Pollard's

Re: 307 digit number factored

2007-10-12 Thread James A. Donald
-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: AFAIK, the only advantage of ECC is that the keys are shorter. The disadvantage is that it isn't as well studied. On past performance, elliptic curves are safer than integers. From time to time, integer based asymmetric encryption is abruptly and surprisingly

RE: Trillian Secure IM

2007-10-12 Thread Bill Stewart
| Which is by the way exactly the case with SecureIM. How | hard is it to brute-force 128-bit DH ? My guesstimate | is it's an order of minutes or even seconds, depending | on CPU resources. Sun's Secure NFS product from the 1980s had 192-bit Diffie-Hellman, and a comment in one of the

Yahoo! follies.

2007-10-12 Thread Perry E. Metzger
Today's hall of shame entrant is, oddly, not a bank, but Yahoo!. Yahoo! Wallet. Because shopping is more fun than typing. o Store all your credit card, shipping and billing information. (Never type it in again!) o Easy check out at 1000s of merchants. o Use Wallet for

Quantum Crytography to be used for Swiss elections

2007-10-12 Thread Leichter, Jerry
No comment from me on the appropriateness. From Computerworld. -- Jerry Quantum cryptography to secure ballots in Swiss election Ellen Messmer October 11, 2007 (Network World) Swiss officials are using quantum cryptography technology

Re: Password hashing

2007-10-12 Thread Steven M. Bellovin
On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:19:18 -0700 james hughes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A proposal for a new password hashing based on SHA-256 or SHA-512 has been proposed by RedHat but to my knowledge has not had any rigorous analysis. The motivation for this is to replace MD-5 based password hashing at

Re: Password hashing

2007-10-12 Thread Adam Back
I would have thought PBKDF2 would be the obvious, standardized (PKCS #5 / RFC 2898) and designed for purpose method to derive a key from a password. PBKDF2 would typically be based on HMAC-SHA1. Should be straight-forward to use PBKDF2 with HMAC-SHA-256 instead for larger key sizes, or for