Even totally ignoring that SHA2 was a thing, anybody looking around would have noticed that MD4 was broken, MD5 was broken, and it would be unlikely that the hash of today would stand forever.
My point was that the choice that was made was considered good enough for the purposes for which it was intended. In the context of the OP's comment, criticizing git for not making different code design choices doesn't mean that Linus was wrong, it may mean that the OP doesn't know and/or understand all the considerations Linus had. And Linus has said many times that the security of the hash is not the primary consideration in his design.
Git's choice of SHA-1 was not at the time predicated on having the single most unbreakable hash in existence, the hash's use is not for security purposes, and to talk with such incredulity about Linus' choice may be to misunderstand git's design requirements.
I'm guessing it's part lack of skill in design, part bad software development tools (uEMACS and makefiles or something), and part just being against c++ et al.
> Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?
He deserves to eat this shit sandwich.
> I wonder how many non-cryptographers knew about SHA-2 back in 2003-2004.
Any systems engineer should have known about SHA-2. SHA-1 only provides 80-bits of security, so everyone else assumed that it would need to be replaced.
I agree that he should've used SHA-2 or better yet, have made the hash algorithm modular, but what does your quote add to the discussion?
Not much, thanks for the gentle reminder :)
There are no practical pre-image attacks for either of them yet. (2^102 for MD4, 2^123 for MD5)