7.3. SHA

The SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) is a family of cryptographic hash functions. The used function in wzdftpd is SHA-1, which is the commonly used function in SSL, TLS, etc. SHA-1 is considered to be the successor to MD5.

To use the SHA-1 format, the password is stored with the special prefix "{SHA}".

Recently (Feb and Aug 2005), two attacks were published to find collisions in SHA-1. This means that an attack is possible with a low complexity, compared to a brute force attack. However, this does not mean that this algorithm can be broken easily, only that finding a collision for SHA-1 is within reach of massive distributed Internet search (are you that famous ?)