On Tue, 2006-28-11 at 11:11 +0000, Daniel Carrera wrote:

I know this is moving further away from Florian's list, but I think we should also include WHIRLPOOL. There are good reasons for this:

1) SHA and RIPMEND are based on the same design principles, the same as MD4/MD5, and hashes from this family are continuously being broken (MD4, MD5, SHA-0, SHA-1 and the original RIPMEND). Some worry that there is a fundamental design problem (see Bruce Schneier) and we need a completely different algorithm.

WHIRLPOOL is the only popular hash I know of that is of a different design.

2) WHIRLPOOL is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 10118-3), is un-patented, is believed to be secure, and it has been recommended by the NESSIE project.

NESSIE = New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity and Encryption

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NESSIE

I notice that NESSIE did _not_ recommend SHA-1 at all, but only the later variants.

In fact, why don't we use the NESSIE list instead of xmlenc? NESSIE's list is WHIRLPOOL, SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512.

I would feel more comfortable using this list than the other one. And we could say that applications must support at least WHIRLPOOL and SHA-256.

What do you think?

Cheers, Daniel.