Re: migration paradigm (was: Is PGP broken?)

[David Honig]

At 11:19 PM 12/4/00 -0800, Bram Cohen wrote:
>On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, William Allen Simpson wrote:
>
>> We could use the excuse of AES implementation to foster a move to a 
>> new common denominator.
>
>AES is silly without an equivalently good secure hash function, which we
>don't have right now.
>

Is there a reason not to use AES block cipher in a hashing mode
if you need a secure digest of some data? 

I can only imagine efficiency reasons, ie, faster to use a dedicated hash
function than to use a full block cipher.  Similarly with stream ciphers;
any block cipher can be  stream cipher and vice versa.  If you were 
doing hardware, you might want to avoid implementing extra algorithms.

dh