NIST Opens Competition for a New Hash Algorithm 187
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology has opened a public competition for the development of a new cryptographic hash algorithm, which will be called Secure Hash Algorithm-3 (SHA-3), and will augment the current algorithms specified in the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-2. This is in response to serious attacks reported in recent years against cryptographic hash algorithms, including SHA-1, and because SHA-1 and the SHA-2 family share a similar design. Submissions are being accepted through October 2008, and the competition timeline indicates that a winner will be announced in 2012."
Encryption != Hashing (Score:4, Informative)
* - Rainbow tables
DIfferent kinds of hash (Score:0, Informative)
Take a full stalk from the marijuana plant--bud, leaves, and all. Strip the bud and the leaves away from the bulk fiber stem. Discard the stem. Roll and crush the bud and leaves together. Compress, twist, and tear. Compress, twist, and tear. Wring the water out of the bulk pulp. Leave the bulk pulp to demoisturize (not dry completely). This is the crudest form of hash and probably the oldest form known to man.
Leftover hash:
Take just the leaves from the marijuana plant. Repeat the process described for crude hash. Use the marijuana buds for normal smoking or cooking. This method allows one to make use of the leaves as well as the bud in separate form.
Crude chemical extract:
Take the buds from the marijuana plant. Break them apart but do not crush or damage the glands (trichomes). Place the broken up buds in ice water, swirl and mix, and scoop out the material which rises to the top. Dry gently (air dry, no heat).
Supercritical chemical extract:
Take the buds from the marijuana plant. Break them apart but do not crush or damage the glands (trichomes). Pack the material into a sealed cylinder. Attach a tube of compressed butane to the sealed cylinder. Discharge the butane through the sealed cylinder. Collect the effluent and allow the butane to evaporate (air dry, no heat).
Sohxlet extract (honey blond hash oil):
Obtain a sohxlet extraction apparatus. Use the buds, possibly the leaves, maybe even the stems from the plant. Extract for at least five cycles using pentane, hexane, or heptane. Collect and dry the extraction solution (air dry, preferably with attached vacuum, as little heat as possible). This is the finest hash oil you'll come across.
In all cases avoid temperatures over 50C. The desireable components, technically, boil around 110-120C but significant amounts may be lost at temperatures over 50C.
ENJOY!
The point of making hash is to denature the typical plant products, such as chlorophyll, and extract them into a water layer (which is removed) or to extract the desireable hydrophobic products away from the bulk plant material. Smoking untreated or uncured marijuana plant material is somewhat flavorful (depending upon personal taste) but usually causes a digestive or nervous reaction (tummyache or headache).
Re:Encryption != Hashing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Very similar to the AES competition (Score:5, Informative)
The NSA has an actual track record here, and their motives have proven good so far. However, they claim that (due to lack of funding and too much competition from financial firms for math PhDs) they aren't so far ahead any more.
Re:Very similar to the AES competition (Score:4, Informative)
Now, it is possible that such statements are just for show, but it takes a belief that they are playing an incredulously deep game that they would make those statements as a denial and deception practice.
Re:No, you're right. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Encryption == Something to Hide (Score:3, Informative)
Modern encryption *does* protect you from malicious altering of information. I encourage you to read up on Message Authentication Code [wikipedia.org] (and all it's sundry relatives, UMAC, HMAC, CMAC). By changing just one character in an encrypted block, you have just caused the MAC to show a mismatch and invalidate the integrity and authenticity of the data. Unless they have the key used for encryption (which would raise the question of why they simply substituted characters in an encrypted field), they are shit out of luck trying to fool anyone. Yes, the cipher block is useless, but no one will be "tricked" by the changed grade, either.
Re:Very similar to the AES competition (Score:5, Informative)
Oh no doubt (Score:3, Informative)
However being a bit ahead in terms of creating a system is real different form being far enough ahead to break systems. To mistrust the NSA on AES means you figure that they know enough to know how to break it, and that they figure the knowledge is so far advanced that no one else will figure it out. One of the NSA's jobs is actually "To achieve information assurance for information infrastructures critical to U.S. national security interests." They are tasked with things like making sure that US financial systems aren't broken in to, hence things like DES/AES. As such if they knowingly allowed a breakable cryptosystem to become the standard and it was in fact broken, they'd have failed in that and have shit to answer for.
So while I certainly believe they are the best in the business, and while I'd not be surprised to discover they know things that public does not, it would imply a staggering advance in cryptography for them to be able to break AES and figure that the public can't. In fact, it would probably imply something along the Tom Clancy lines of a computer that could break ANY machine based cypher and as such no matter what crypto you used short of a one time pad, you'd be screwed.
I just don't find it reasonable to believe that. I find it more reasonable to believe that since good crypto is out there anyhow, and since their job is to protect US interests, that they did an honest analysis of AES and found it to be highly secure, just as everyone else did.
Re:Encryption != Hashing (Score:3, Informative)
Or imagine this: you have a simple hash function that takes all the letters in a message, turns them into number based on their place in the alphabet, and adds them up to generate the sum. If that sum goes over 10,000 then it would do a mod 10,000 to wrap it around. There's an infinite number of plaintexts that can generate the exact same hash based on this hash algorithm. However, what you can never do is figure out which specific one generated it.