Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by drakaal 4578 days ago
Nothing to do with prime numbers?

http://www.femto-second.com/papers/SHA256LimitedStatisticalA...

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4634.txt

http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/548.pdf

http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/548.pdf

1 comments

Yes, nothing to do with prime numbers. SHA-2 uses some constants. A lot of cryptography needs constants for various reasons. There is always some concern that the creator chose specific constants that weaken or give them a backdoor to the crypto scheme. To reduce this concern, they often choose constants from some simple mathematical basis, perhaps the numbers '1234567890', or digits of pi, etc. In SHA-2's case, they used the first 32 bits of the fractional parts of the square roots of the first n primes.

The numbers they use are not primes, nor are primes useful in any way for attacking SHA. The algorithm still has nothing to do with prime numbers.