Subject: [tcpm] FYI - some preliminary perf comparison of MD5 vs. SHA-1

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:44:14 -0800

Hi, all,

I noted some comparative performance of SHA1 and MD5 at the meeting in
Vancouver; here are some measurements made on a FreeBSD 5.4 PC using
IPsec transport mode.

I can post the machine specifics if they're useful, but the key is that
software SHA1 is quite a bit slower than MD5.'

Both are HMACs of 96 bits, FYI.

TCP
   No crypt       529 Mb/s
   hmac-md5       228 Mb/s
   hmac-sha1      146 Mb/s

Note that SHA1 is big-endian and MD5 is little-endian; we'll figure out
how much that matters and report back as well (in the past it's affected
performance by as much as 30%).

FYI, Schneier reports that SHA-1 is "broken" too:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html
(though neither SHA1 nor MD5 collision attacks defeat per se their use
within HMACs)

Does anyone know of a hash that is alleged to be faster than MD5?

Joe

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