Securely downloading Ubuntu

[Ivan Krstić]

On Jan 28, 2008, at 5:28 PM, Neal McBurnett wrote:
> Cryptographers are nervous about not only MD5, but also all the  
> functions in the same class, which includes SHA-1 and SHA-256.  The  
> latter ones use more bits and thus have more life in them than MD5


This is an oversimplification. The SHA-2 family is not merely a longer  
SHA-1; while closely based on SHA-1, the SHA-2 compression function is  
different enough that the resulting hashes are much stronger, and  
practical attacks on SHA-2 are considered unlikely in at least the  
next ten years.

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org