MD5 is a widely used hash system; it was invented in 1991. In 1996 a flaw was found in the system making it vulnerable to certain types of attacks, although it wasn’t until 2004 that a more serious flaw was found and the system declared “broken”. SHA-1 was created as a replacement for MD5. It uses similar principles, but is a more conservative design. It outputs a 160 bit hash rather than 128 bit. Due to the flaws found in MD5, SHA-1 was promoted. Over the years weaknesses in SHA-1 have been found, however it is still better than MD5. As of current MD5 is considered completely broken, whereas SHA-1 is still reasonable against the most concentrated attacks. The best know attack requires 2^61 SHA-1 calculations. The computing resources required to perform this are still enormous.
MD5 and SHA-1 are probably the most common hashes systems in use. SHA-1 having replaced MD5 in many cases. The larger hash size alone makes it better as the chances of collisions are further reduced. SHA-1 does come at a cost though. It takes more work to calculate a SHA-1 hash than an MD5 hash.Also the output hash takes up more storage. However if only 128 bits are wanted of a hash, it is acceptable to take the first (or in fact any) 128 bits of a SHA-1 hash. This is still better than using MD5.
I wrote the Proof-Of-Work program using MD5 as it was fast. However I want to build up a library of public domain C source code of several hash functions. SHA-1 is the next obvious one. So I present here source code for SHA-1 hashes, including a program to calculate a SHA-1 hash from the command line.
Sha1String.zip – Contains full source code for SHA-1 and the program Sha1String. Includes x64 binaries for OSX and Windows.
The functions and types in LibSha1.h match the ones in LibMd5.h presented earlier. This makes it very easy to substitute one system with the other. When I add more hash algorithms in the future, they will also follow the same format.
This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.
Water Juice 