Opinions on RIPEMD vs SHA?

[Werner Koch]

On Wed,  8 Jul 2009 18:56, bmearns at ieee.org said:

> I'm considering making my default hash RIPEMD160: does anyone have any
> opinions on how this compares to SHA-2 algorithms in terms of both

Don't do that.  RIPEMD160 is a pure European algorithm and by design not
different than SHA-1; like most hash algorithms it is based on the same
principles as MD4 is.  There is no reason to believe that RIPEMD-160 is
stronger than the SHA-1.

If you want to do business with European governments you need to support
RIPEMD-160 - well at least until last year.  Since this year, SHA-256 is
a requirement for most purposes.

> security and availability? I like the idea that RIPEMD was developed
> in an academic community instead of the NSA, but if there are genuine

Well, if you look at the prominent people from that community you will
notice strong links to the country's respective TLAs.

> romanticism. I'm especially curious if RIPEMD160 is commonly available
> in popular PGP clients.

GnuPG might be the only OpenPGP implementation to support it.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

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