Linux Kernel Patches Posted For Streebog - Crypto From Russia's FSB

Just months after the controversial Speck crypto code was added to the Linux kernel that raised various concerns due to its development by the NSA and potential backdoors, which was then removed from the kernel tree, there is now Russia's Streebog that could be mainlined.

The Streebog cryptographic hash was developed by Russia's controversial FSB federal security service and other Russian organizations. Streebog is a Russian national standard and a replacement to their GOST hash function. Streebog doesn't have as much controversy as NSA's Speck, but then again it's not as well known but there is are some hypothetical attacks and some papers have questioned some elements of the design. Streebog is considered to be a competitor to the SHA-3 standard from the NIST.

Published a few days ago were patches adding Streebog to the Linux kernel's crypto code. That was succeeded this morning by v2 patches of the Streebog hash functions for the Linux kernel. There doesn't appear to be any patches pending for having any kernel components begin making use of Streebog for either file-system encryption or other crypto purposes. The patch comments don't detail either their motivation for getting this hash function added to the kernel.

Long story short, we'll see if this 1,300 lines of code gets added to the crypto subsystem in the mainline Linux kernel. The work is being pushed by Vitaly Chikunov of the Russian distribution ALT Linux as his apparent first patch attempt for the mainline kernel.