digest algorithm performance

[P]

I haven't looked too deeply into this,
so this is just a heads up.

I have a util which currently uses md5sum
to compare file contents, and in light of
the recent vulnerabilities¹ I have decided
to use _in addition_ another digest algorithm.

So I compared the performance of the digests
available in coreutils-5.2.1-31 (fedora core 3).

sha1sum = .341s
md5sum  = .116s
sum -s  = .047s #SysV
sum -r  = .168s #BSD (default)
cksum   = .127s

with those in openssl-0.9.7a-40 (man dgst)

sha1    =  .209s
md5     =  .110s
md2     = 3.070s
md4     =  .135s
sha     =  .318s
rmd160  =  .277s

Now CRC doesn't seem to be that useful²,
so I would like to use sha1, but it
can be seen above that the coreutils
implementation is significantly slower
when compared to openssl?

cheers.

¹ http://www.cits.rub.de/MD5Collisions/
² http://cryptography.hyperlink.cz/2004/otherformats.html

--
Pádraig Brady - http://www.pixelbeat.org
--