Hash Function Availability (sha / md5)

[Florian Weimer]

On 11/04/2016 02:11 AM, Patrick Herbst wrote:
> The glibc crypt function uses sha and/or md5, but it doesn't appear
> these routines are in a published header for application programming.

That's the intent, yes.

> Am I wrong on this?  Are there headers/libraries that are part of
> glibc that offer these hash functions natively?
>
> If not, why?

The hash functions are an internal implementation detail.  The 
implementations we have today are not optimized and do not use hardware 
acceleration (except on sparc64).

I know that there is no compelling or canonical source of hash functions 
right now.  All existing cryptographic libraries are weird in some way, 
perhaps with the exception of GNUTLS (but it's way too large if you just 
need a hash function).

Thanks,
Florian