secure hash modes for rijndael

[John Kelsey]

At 05:11 PM 4/2/01 -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

...
>I asked some NIST folks that question.  Their answer was that they 
>didn't have the resources to run two large, public efforts 
>simultaneously.  Hash functions induce much less public paranoia than 
>do encryption algorithms; few people think that NSA wants to forge 
>hashes.

The really weird part is, finding collisions in hash functions lets you do
much more interesting attacks than just reading someone's mail, but those
are attacks that you'd do to frame someone or steal money from them, not to
gather intelligence.  By default, I guess NSA is more-or-less trusted with
the ability to steal lots of money, but not with the ability to eavesdrop
on everyone....

>		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb

--John



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