linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] kernel:gen_kheaders:Replace md5sum to sha256sum

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Date:   Fri, 23 Sep 2022 11:12:42 -0700
From:   Daniel Mentz <danielmentz@...gle.com>
To:     Bhaskar Chowdhury <unixbhaskar@...il.com>
Cc:     masahiroy@...nel.org, lkml <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] kernel:gen_kheaders:Replace md5sum to sha256sum

On Fri, Sep 23, 2022 at 4:06 AM Bhaskar Chowdhury <unixbhaskar@...il.com> wrote:
> Thought to apply a better encryption mechanism.

MD5 and SHA256 are secure (or, in the case of MD5, not so secure) hash
algorithms, not encryption mechanisms.

> Replace all occurance of md5sum to sha256sum .

Looking at this script, I'm not convinced that it relies on MD5 being
a cryptophically secure hash function. It appears to me as if this
script uses MD5 to simply detect innocent changes to a set of files as
opposed to guarding against malicious attacks. I also found that
sha256sum takes almost three times longer than md5sum. So, in the
absence of security requirements, md5sum might actually be the better
choice because it's faster.