| ▲ | zamalek 8 hours ago |
| Exactly. But that's why I think SHA was a mistake. He should have gone with something like murmur to avoid all this frothing at the mouth. |
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| ▲ | layer8 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It was a mistake to assume a fixed algorithm in the repository format and client-server protocol. I remember being surprised when I learned about that choice, being familiar with cryptographic protocols and formats where the hash algorithm is usually a parameter that can vary for each concrete hash. |
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| ▲ | loeg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > being familiar with cryptographic protocols and formats where the hash algorithm is usually a parameter that can vary for each concrete hash. This flexibility ("agility") in cryptographic protocols is often seen as a mistake today, actually. | | |
| ▲ | WorldMaker an hour ago | parent [-] | | Cryptographic protocols have been moving towards something of a compromise in flexibility. "Everything flexible" is a security risk, especially when "everything" includes "fallback to nothing secure". "No flexibility" is a security risk because you can't upgrade. The middle path is something like "version numbers" with hard breakpoints. "I only support v2 of this cryptographic protocol and will not fallback to v1." Which is sort of the hash algorithm approach git is taking with incompatible versions and a version break. |
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| ▲ | throw0101c 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It was a mistake to assume a fixed algorithm in the repository format and client-server protocol. See also perhaps Wireguard, which touts itself as not having "cryptographic agility" because they wanted to avoid all (perceived) problems and complications of IPsec. But now that PQC is (allegedly) approaching there's no easy to update things because (AIUI) there's no negotiation possible in the protocol; you're basically standing up a 'Wireguard 2.0' that runs separately than the original. | | | |
| ▲ | throwawayffffas 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | 1. As others have noted, flexibility in cryptographic protocols is generally a mistake. 2. The hash function is not used for cryptographic purposes! |
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| ▲ | Someone 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Linus, in 2005, couldn’t have gone for murmur, from 2008. Was there “something like murmur” in 2005 that’s cryptographically better than SHA1? |
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| ▲ | sgerenser 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, in 2005, SHA-1 was just about the best you can do given the constraints of the time (without picking something much more esoteric, much slower, etc.). Using SHA-256 at that time would have been noticeably slower on the computers of the time, and made repo metadata take up a lot more space. |
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| ▲ | bawolff 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If that was true, i doubt git would have switched to using the slower version of sha-1 that detects attacks. |
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| ▲ | kazinator 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Frothers gonna froth, though. |
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| ▲ | huflungdung 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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