Support for mctVersion property

[tio-checo]

Hi guys,

I am wondering if there is any plan to support mctVersion JSON property applicable to SHA-1 and SHA-2 Monte Carlo tests. It can be set to either "standard" or "alternate" and selects if standard or alternate MCT is run.

I am asking, since I have been recently provided with set of test vectors from 3rd party specifying alternate MCTs, so I would appreciate if libacvp could be enhanced to recognize and run this type of tests.

If there are no plans to add support for this property, then knowing that would be useful as well, since then I could plan accordingly.

Thank you,
Jan

[abkarcher]

Hi Jan,
Sorry for the delay getting back to you. We want to support as many testing methods as possible especially for primitives like SHA. I will spend some time looking at this and get back to you ASAP, but there is other work i must complete first. Hopefully should have some time in the coming weeks.

Thanks,
Andrew

[tio-checo]

Hi Andrew,

thank you for looking into this, I appreciate it.

For the record, the 3rd party providing us with test vectors recently switched from alternate to standard MCTs for SHA-1 and SHA-2, so at this point this is not something which would be blocking me from making a progress.

With that said, it would still be useful to have this feature supported, since they may reconsider again (I asked about that, but they were not able to clarify what was driving this decision) as well as I can imagine that somebody else could benefit from this.

Best regards,
Jan