Can anyone shed some light into SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160, which algorithm is normally faster and what are the performance and space comparisons, if any? By space comparisons I don't mean 160 bits and 256 bits, but what are the collisions frequency, difference in space requirements in production env. and time to calculate both. Is RIPEMD-160 a requirement for European countries? Any additional information, that would be helpful in deciding.
A:
As for SHA-256 there are no known collisions. I believe that while some advances have been made in generating collisions in SHA-1 faster than brute force, that those are still not practical and certainly not applicable for SHA-256.
I'm not very familiar with RIPEMD-160 so I cannot say much about it.
Erik Edin
2009-09-10 11:21:31