NIST recommends that anyone relying on SHA-1 for security switch to using the more secure SHA-2 and SHA-3 groups of algorithms.
Credit: B. Hayes/NIST
The SHA-1 algorithm, one of the first widely used methods of protecting electronic information, has reached the end of its useful life, according to security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The agency is now recommending that IT professionals replace SHA-1, in the limited situations where it is still used, with newer algorithms that are more secure.
SHA-1, whose initials stand for “secure hash algorithm,” has been in use since 1995 as part of the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-1. It is a slightly modified version of SHA, the first hash function the federal government standardized for widespread use in 1993. As today’s increasingly powerful computers are able to attack the algorithm, NIST is announcing that SHA-1 should be phased out by Dec. 31, 2030, in favor of the more secure SHA-2 and SHA-3 groups of algorithms.
“We recommend that anyone relying on SHA-1 for security migrate to SHA-2 or SHA-3 as soon as possible,” said NIST computer scientist Chris Celi.
SHA-1 has served as a building block for many security applications, such as validating websites — so that when you load a webpage, you can trust that its purported source is genuine. It secures information by performing a complex math operation on the characters of a message, producing a short string of characters called a hash. It is impossible to reconstruct the original message from the hash alone, but knowing the hash provides an easy way for a recipient to check whether the original message has been compromised, as even a slight c ..
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