Re: MD5 x SHA-1

[John Adams <jna-dated-1039715508.2add0b () retina net>]

On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Kevin Steves wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 03:02:31PM -0800, John Adams wrote:
> > > MD5 or SHA-1
> > SHA is slower, MD5 is faster.
> that depends on software, platform, hardware, etc.

We're comparing algorithms here, which was the poster's original question. 
Implementation is another thing alltogether. 
 
> just for comparison, following is an HP A180 running HP-UX (hardware
> from ~1999) then my ~1.5 year old thinkpad X21 running OpenBSD.
>
> $ openssl speed md5 sha1
> The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
> type              8 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
> md5               1949.84k     8505.75k    16080.73k    20638.38k    22423.22k
> sha1              1402.56k     6984.10k    13484.89k    17485.57k    19226.62k

Your test results confirm my previous post. 

There's simply more work to be done in SHA1 vs. MD5 (more rounds, greater
bit length of the hash) and while you could have an implementation that is
faster, fundamentally it's extremely difficult to calculate SHA1 faster
than MD5.

You can't even parallelize the process of calculating the hash for speed.  
Like the rounds in 3DES, each subsequent calculation is dependent on the
first, and you'd have to wait for each step to complete before going onto 
the next. 

--john

-- 
J. Adams                                        http://www.retina.net/~jna

The secret of knowing where you are, is knowing what time it is. -- Anonmyous


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