News

Dekart announces the certification of its cryptographic libraries by NIST as corresponding to SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512

May 13, 2005  Dekart (www.dekart.com), the developer of trusted and user-friendly encryption software and access control solutions, announced that the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST  www.nist.gov) has certified the company's cryptographic libraries as conforming to the Secure Hash Algorithms SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512. As all Dekart encryption programs use these algorithms for generating secret cryptographic keys, its users can now be sure that no vulnerabilities recently discovered in SHA-1 would ever compromise the security of their confidential information.

The recent news about the attacks that can find collisions in SHA-1, requiring less than 2^69 operations (vs. 2^80 operations needed for a brute-force attack) urged the cryptographic community to look for new, more secure solutions. SHA-2 (which includes SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512) is the result of these efforts.

The SHA-2 family is meant to overcome the drawbacks of the previously used hashing algorithms, by switching to words of a longer length. Secure Hash Algorithms are specified in Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-2, Secure Hash Standard (SHS) http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips180-2/fips180-2.pdf.

As a result of this validation, users of Dekart Private Disk, and other Dekart solutions, can be confident in the fact that their private information is 100% secure and protected against all kinds of attacks, as the program uses SHA-512 for generating secret cryptographic keys and 256-bit AES for encryption (256-bit AES encryption vs. brute force). With this type of protection your financial information, business plans, private documents or any other type of sensitive data are safe.