OSEC

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Subject: Re: SHA-256 performance
From: Bram Cohen (bramgawth.com)
Date: Mon Oct 16 2000 - 15:26:46 CDT

On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Eric Young wrote:

> I've finally had a play with SHA-256, and for a C implementation
> on a Pentium II 350, I'm getting about 9,700,000 bytes/sec if I'm using
> 16k blocks. I'm not sure what other people are seeing as performance,
> but since SHA1 get at least 30,000,000 byte/sec, this is not that good.
>
> It is interesting to see the trend of block ciphers getting faster,
> hashes getting slower. I can see that there will be good reasons not
> to use SHA-256 in protocols outside of digital signatures.

This is rather alarming, and I doubt there's any good technical reason for
it.

A competition similar to AES selection to come up with a hash function
would be most welcome.

-Bram Cohen