PKI Consortium blog

Why We Need to Move to SHA-2
January 30, 2014 by Bruce Morton (Entrust), Clayton Smith (Entrust) Attack SHA2 SSL/TLS
Previously, we advised that the SSL industry must move to the SHA-2 hashing algorithm for certificate signatures. We thought it would be helpful to provide the reasoning behind the position. In the context of SSL, the purpose of a hashing algorithm is to reduce a message (e.g., a certificate) to a reasonable size for use with a digital signature algorithm. The hash value, or message digest, is then signed to allow an end-user to validate the certificate and ensure it was issued by a trusted certification authority (CA).