md2 on current and 10.

Mikhail T. mi+thun at aldan.algebra.com
Fri Dec 20 21:46:44 UTC 2013


Thinking more about the MD2, I'd say, FreeBSD should not have removed the algorithm.

Although no longer deemed sufficiently secure, it is still in use and people
using it on FreeBSD-8.x and 9.x today may wish to continue doing so after
upgrading to 10.x

In the old "Mechanism vs. Policy" debate
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_mechanism_and_policy> we erred on
the side of policy and it does not seem right... Whether or not to use MD2 is
(or should be) left up to the users of FreeBSD. Even if OpenSSL no longer
provides it, libmd should continue to.

In other words, /if you like your digest algorithm, you can keep it/. Yours,

    -mi



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