SECURED HASH ALGORITHM-1: Review Paper

This paper discusses about the Secure Hash Algorithm. To throw some light on the origins of Secure Hash Algorithm, the SHA was designed by NSA-National Security Agency which is a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) published by the United States NIST-National Institute of Standards and Technology. Secure Hash Algorithm is abbreviated as SHA. SHA has many versions starting from SHA-0 followed by SHA-1, SHA-2 etc. Here the main discussion is about SHA-1. Before starting with the SHA-1 it is necessary to know about SHA-0 and why was SHA-1 introduced after SHA-0.SHA-1 is the modified version of SHA-0 which was published in 1993. SHA-0 was not adopted by many applications so the NSA proposed SHA-1 after discovering some weaknesses in the SHA-0. SHA-1 was published in 1995 and holds certification of FIPS PUB 180-4 and CRYPTREC [1].