vincenthz / hs-cryptohash

efficient and practical cryptohashing in haskell. DEPRECATED in favor of cryptonite
Other
30 stars 24 forks source link

Why not use existing implementations? #5

Closed brinchj closed 13 years ago

brinchj commented 13 years ago

Brian Gladman has a well-documented and portable versions of the SHA family hashes: http://www.gladman.me.uk/

From what I can see, he seems qualified to implement SHA.

The Skein team also published optimized versions of their hash functions.

Why not use these tested implementations by Cryptographers instead of maintaining new ones?

vincenthz commented 13 years ago

When someone will maintain a consistent package of hash algorithms, it could be considered to switch to it;

However having lots of different implementations that are very different in the way they get built, and the way that they get optimized, make maintaining it a massive pain. Also the specifications for some hashes is really well described, you don't necessarily need to a professional cryptographer to do a good implementation (FYI all my implementations were compared to the one in the linux kernel when available).

one could also put in parallel the AES (wrapper around Brian Gladman's AES implementation) package problem, Michael reported: http://osdir.com/ml/haskell-cafe@haskell.org/2011-02/msg00211.html