Fergie's Tech Blog

U.S. Considers New Digital-Signature Standard

Anne Broache and Declan McCullagh write in C|Net News:

A team of Chinese scientists shocked the data security world this year by announcing a flaw in a widely used technique used to create and verify digital signatures in e-mail and on the Web.

Now the U.S. government is trying to figure out what to do about it.

The decade-old algorithm, called the Secure Hash Algorithm, or SHA-1, is an official federal standard and is embedded in every modern Web browser and operating system. Any change will be expensive and time-consuming--and a poor choice by the government would mean that the successor standard may not survive another 10 years.

posted by Fergie @ 11/01/2005 08:34:00 AM