Attempt to clarify what the SHAttered attack means in practice for
Git. The previous version of the text made no mention whatsoever of
Git already having a mitigation for this specific attack, which the
SHAttered researchers claim will detect cryptanalytic collision
attacks.
I may have gotten some of the nuances wrong, but as far as I know this
new text accurately summarizes the current situation with SHA-1 in
git. I.e. git doesn't really use SHA-1 anymore, it uses
Hardened-SHA-1 (they just so happen to produce the same outputs
99.99999999999...% of the time).
Thus the previous text was incorrect in asserting that:
[...]As a result [of SHAttered], SHA-1 cannot be considered
cryptographically secure any more[...]
That's not the case. We have a mitigation against SHAttered, *however*
we consider it prudent to move to work towards a NewHash should future
vulnerabilities in either SHA-1 or Hardened-SHA-1 emerge.
Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
5988eb631a