diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/technical/hash-function-transition.txt | 29 |
1 files changed, 24 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/hash-function-transition.txt b/Documentation/technical/hash-function-transition.txt index 34396f13ec..4ab6cd1012 100644 --- a/Documentation/technical/hash-function-transition.txt +++ b/Documentation/technical/hash-function-transition.txt @@ -28,11 +28,30 @@ advantages: address stored content. Over time some flaws in SHA-1 have been discovered by security -researchers. https://shattered.io demonstrated a practical SHA-1 hash -collision. As a result, SHA-1 cannot be considered cryptographically -secure any more. This impacts the communication of hash values because -we cannot trust that a given hash value represents the known good -version of content that the speaker intended. +researchers. On 23 February 2017 the SHAttered attack +(https://shattered.io) demonstrated a practical SHA-1 hash collision. + +Git v2.13.0 and later subsequently moved to a hardened SHA-1 +implementation by default, which isn't vulnerable to the SHAttered +attack. + +Thus Git has in effect already migrated to a new hash that isn't SHA-1 +and doesn't share its vulnerabilities, its new hash function just +happens to produce exactly the same output for all known inputs, +except two PDFs published by the SHAttered researchers, and the new +implementation (written by those researchers) claims to detect future +cryptanalytic collision attacks. + +Regardless, it's considered prudent to move past any variant of SHA-1 +to a new hash. There's no guarantee that future attacks on SHA-1 won't +be published in the future, and those attacks may not have viable +mitigations. + +If SHA-1 and its variants were to be truly broken, Git's hash function +could not be considered cryptographically secure any more. This would +impact the communication of hash values because we could not trust +that a given hash value represented the known good version of content +that the speaker intended. SHA-1 still possesses the other properties such as fast object lookup and safe error checking, but other hash functions are equally suitable |