Cryptographic hash algorithms such as MD2, MD4, MD5, MD6, HAVAL-128, HMAC-MD5, DSA (which uses SHA-1), RIPEMD, RIPEMD-128, RIPEMD-160, HMACRIPEMD160 and SHA-1 are no longer considered secure, because it is possible to have collisions (little computational effort is enough to find two or more different inputs that produce the same hash).

Ask Yourself Whether

The hashed value is used in a security context like:

• User-password storage.
• Security token generation (used to confirm e-mail when registering on a website, reset password, etc …​).
• To compute some message integrity.

There is a risk if you answered yes to any of those questions.

Recommended Secure Coding Practices

Safer alternatives, such as SHA-256, SHA-512, SHA-3 are recommended, and for password hashing, it’s even better to use algorithms that do not compute too "quickly", like bcrypt, scrypt, argon2 or pbkdf2 because it slows down brute force attacks.

Sensitive Code Example

FROM ubuntu:22.04

# Sensitive
RUN echo "a40216e7c028e7d77f1aec22d2bbd5f9a357016f  go1.20.linux-amd64.tar.gz" | sha1sum -c
RUN tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.20.linux-amd64.tar.gz
ENV PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin"

Compliant Solution

FROM ubuntu:22.04

RUN echo "5a9ebcc65c1cce56e0d2dc616aff4c4cedcfbda8cc6f0288cc08cda3b18dcbf1  go1.20.linux-amd64.tar.gz" | sha256sum -c
RUN tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.20.linux-amd64.tar.gz
ENV PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin"

See

• OWASP Top 10 2021 Category A2 - Cryptographic Failures
• OWASP Top 10 2017 Category A3 - Sensitive Data Exposure
• OWASP Top 10 2017 Category A6 - Security Misconfiguration
• Mobile AppSec Verification Standard - Cryptography Requirements
• OWASP Mobile Top 10 2016 Category M5 - Insufficient Cryptography
• MITRE, CWE-1240 - Use of a Risky Cryptographic Primitive
• SANS Top 25 - Porous Defenses