Cryptography
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SHA-1


    The Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1), based on MD4, was proposed by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) for certain U.S. federal government applications. The main differences of SHA-1 from MD4 are as follows:

    1. The hash-value is 160 bits, and five (vs. four) 32-bit chaining variables are used.

    2. The compression function has four rounds instead of three, using theMD4 step functions f, g, and h as follows: f in the first, g in the third, and h in both the second and fourth rounds. Each round has 20 steps instead of 16.

    3. Within the compression function, each 16-word message block is expanded to an 80- word block, by a process whereby each of the last 64 of the 80 words is the XOR of 4 words from earlier positions in the expanded block. These 80 words are then input one-word-per-step to the 80 steps.

    4. The core step is modified as follows: the only rotate used is a constant 5-bit rotate; the fifth working variable is added into each step result; message words from the expanded message block are accessed sequentially; and C is updated as B rotated left 30 bits, rather than simply B.

    5. SHA-1 uses four non-zero additive constants, whereas MD4 used three constants only two of which were non-zero.

    The byte ordering used for converting between streams of bytes and 32-bitwords in the official SHA-1 specification is big-endian; this differs from MD4 which is little-endian.


SHA-1

    Security of SHA-1: Compared to 128-bit hash functions, the 160-bit hash-value of SHA-1 provides increased security against brute-force attacks. SHA-1 presently appear to be of comparable strength; both are considered stronger than MD5. In SHA-1, a significant effect of the expansion of 16- word message blocks to 80 words in the compression function is that any two distinct 16- word blocks yield 80-word values which differ in a larger number of bit positions, significantly expanding the number of bit differences among message words input to the compression function. The redundancy added by this preprocessing evidently adds strength.


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