The RXTE archive contains SHA(-1) (FIPS 180-1) digests for all its
data products. But, to my knowledge, it has not been used by any users
worried about the integrity of the data they received.

- Arnold

Rob Seaman wrote:
Thierry Forveille wrote:

Is anyone on the list aware of uses of the MD5 checksum in FITS
beyond protection against accidental bitflips from bad hardware?

Good question!

If the goal is to protect against data accidents (whatever the cause),
the FITS checksum should be considered as a strong contender instead
of any secure hash.

That said, MD5 is used by default for many astronomical data transport
and archive chores. As the broader computing communities continue to
transition to SHA-2, support for MD5-based utilities will narrow.
Remediating this is certainly not a top priority, however, which is
why I worded it as a "reminder" :-)

When implementing new systems, there are few good arguments for
choosing MD5.

Rob

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Arnold H. Rots Chandra X-ray Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory tel: +1 617 496 7701
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USA http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
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