Securely downloading Ubuntu

[Ivan Krstić]

On Jan 29, 2008, at 1:16 PM, Colin Watson wrote:
> Do you know what the state of cryptanalytic research is on  
> Whirlpool? My
> concern is that the MD5/SHA family, for all its faults, has been
> extremely extensively cryptanalysed, and at least we know where we
> stand, while the other families are still relatively unknown.


That's correct. Whirlpool is AES-based, which is slightly reassuring,  
but its designers have to my knowledge never presented it in an  
academic conference; even so, it passed quite some scrutiny when it  
was submitted to (and subsequently selected by) the NESSIE project.  
For high-security applications, combining a SHA-2 variant and either  
RIPEMD-160 or Whirlpool is sufficient to satisfy even the  
professionally paranoid among us. I chose a SHA-256+Whirlpool  
combination for signature verification in the OLPC firmware.

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