Quote from: jonald_fyookball on April 23, 2015, 03:37:25 AM

I wonder if YOU are reading it, or comprehend what you are reading.

The link you posted says:
"there hasnt been any result that calls into question the soundness of SHA-2 at all."

Stuff like: "hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted"
or "build entry points into their products." have nothing to do with the hash function.

No doubt the NSA are bunch of vipers that should not be trusted on any level,
but I don't think they have a preimage attack on SHA-256.

Saying that they might is just baseless speculation, and none of the articles
are suggesting that.

Quote from: Bitware on April 23, 2015, 05:17:19 AM

Lots of mental masturbation posted, but no proof of a single collision with SHA-256 has been posted yet.

From the nytimes article above

"The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards..."

"And the agency used its influence as the worlds most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world."

"For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies, said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart... When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, those not already briefed were gobsmacked!

And that is really the milder stuff.

Any person can follow the links and research a bit and most people will come to the conclusion that the NSA is deliberately giving a defective product to the public so they can derive short term benefits.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time arguing this. My interest is in not losing the little that I have because of some overly ambitious jackass bureaucrats who have zero integrity. Why some people online seems to work so hard to cover the misconduct of crooked nsa vermin, anyone can speculate.

If someone wants to research the subject further here are the first few links that come up on a search. I have not read any of them yet.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backdoor-in-rsas-cryptography-a-technical-primer/

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291217.0

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/video/NSA-encryption-backdoor-How-likely-is-it

http://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoor/

Now it is easy to predict that someone will again try to divert the discussion or distract attention from evidence that the NSA has subverted sha2