Re: SHA, MD, and openssl

[Pádraig Brady]

On 12/12/2013 10:15 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
>     The Major Component here is not the Linux kernel; it's cryptographic
>     services, which these days are a major essential component of many
>     operating systems, including common GNU/Linux distributions.
> 
> I don't think "cryptographic services" is a system component.
> It is a category of uses of software, not even a collection
> of programs, let alone a single component.
> 
>     > I don't think it satisfies (b) either.
> 
>     I don't see why not, for the crypto hash functions we're talking
>     about.  MD5, SHA256, etc. are all interfaces that are official
>     standards defined by recognized standards bodies, and implementations
>     for them are available to the public in source code form.
> 
> MD5 and SHA256 are not interfaces.  They are algorithms.

But SHA1 and SHA256 are commonly available accelerated in hardware.
For this very small subset of routines should we not consider
libcrypto as a system library to these hardware specific interfaces.

thanks,
Pádraig.