Linux 4.21 Positioned To Pickup Streebog Crypto Support Developed By Russia's FSB

In addition to Linux 4.21 set to land Adiantum as the crypto algorithm backed by Google following the company's falling out with the NSA's Speck crypto for low-end data encryption, Streebog is also set to be introduced as a cryptographic hash function developed in large part by the Russian government.

The Linux kernel patches introducing the Streebog code were posted back in October for review. Those patches were spearheaded by a developer from Russia's ALT Linux distribution. Those patches are now queued into the crypto subsystem's development branch ahead of the Linux 4.21 kernel.

Streebog was developed by the Russian FSB federal security service as an alternative to SHA-3. Streebog supports outputting 256-bit and 512-bit hashes. There have been some questions raised about the original design of Streebog and possible attacks, but is just a hashing function and doesn't have nearly as much controversy around it as NSA's Speck cipher that caused so much controversy earlier this year in the Linux kernel crypto space.

So the Streebog hashing support is now queued into the crypto staging area ahead of the Linux 4.21 merge window opening in about one month. At this time there doesn't appear to be any planned immediate users of the Streebog hashing code within the Linux kernel.