PuTTY wish hmac-sha2-512

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summary: Support for HMAC-SHA-512 in SSH-2
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.

RFC 6668 specifies two new MAC algorithms for SSH-2. PuTTY has support for HMAC-SHA-256 (called "hmac-sha2-256" in the protocol), but does not have support for the optional HMAC-SHA-512 ("hmac-sha2-512").

It would be simple enough to add support for HMAC-SHA-512, but this would gain practically nothing. HMAC-SHA-256 has an effective security of 256 bits, the same as the best of PuTTY's key-exchange algorithms. Any attacker able to break SHA-256 can simply extract the MAC key by reversing the key exchange, so using HMAC-SHA-512 is pointless. Adding it would come with costs in code size and complexity and in expansion of PuTTY's KEXINIT packet and while small, these costs outweigh the negligible benefits.

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Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2017-02-07 08:41:12 +0000)