Quote from: jonald_fyookball on April 23, 2015, 06:59:15 PM

Quote from: no-rice-peas on April 23, 2015, 05:21:49 PM

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.

Yes, any person can follow the links but I honestly haven't seen anyone come to that conclusion specifically about SHA-256 or SHA-2.

I think this quote sums it up:

Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on September 05, 2013, 09:36:39 PM

SHA-2 is an open algorithm and it uses as its constants the sequential prime cube roots as a form of "nothing up my sleeve numbers". For someone to find a weakness or backdoor in SHA would be the equivalent of the nobel prize in cryptography. Everyone who is anyone in the cryptography community has looked at SHA-2. Not just everyone with a higher degree in mathematics, computer science, or cryptography in the last 20 years but foreign intelligence agencies and major financial institutions. Nobody has found a flaw, not even an theoretical one (a faster than brute force solution which requires so much energy/time as to be have no real world value).

To believe the the NSA has broken SHA-2 would be to believe that the NSA found something the entire rest of the world combined hasn't found for twenty years. Also NIST still considers SHA-2 secure and prohibits the use of any other hashing algorithm (to include SHA-3 so far) in classified networks. So that would mean the NSA is keeping a flaw/exploit from NIST compromising US national security.

Anything is possible but occam's razor and all that.

Anyway, you seem to have made up your own mind about the matter, so I guess that's the end of the discussion. Grin

cheers.

Cheers.

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/

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