Hardware acceleration for SHA1 was introduced by the manufacturers around 2016-2019 in their architectures (including low-power architectures like Atom; and even Raspberry Pi supports it already since 3B). Most SHA1 implementations already support the hardware acceleration for long. Hardware-SHA1 is much more efficient than MD5.
Does it make sense to introduce the possibility to use SHA1 instead of MD5?
Another question is if it makes sense to generally replace MD5 by SHA1: it can be questioned if machines that still have no SHA extensions are still used for performance-critical operations. Also, on contemporary architectures in general, there are many comparisons out there which indicate that even without hardware acceleration SHA1 is often faster than MD5 because of the latter's limited capability to make efficient use of modern processor's architectures.
The increased resistance of SHA1 against collisions might be noted as well, although it is not very important for this use case.
And thanks for maintaining this great tool!
Hardware acceleration for SHA1 was introduced by the manufacturers around 2016-2019 in their architectures (including low-power architectures like Atom; and even Raspberry Pi supports it already since 3B). Most SHA1 implementations already support the hardware acceleration for long. Hardware-SHA1 is much more efficient than MD5.
Does it make sense to introduce the possibility to use SHA1 instead of MD5?
Another question is if it makes sense to generally replace MD5 by SHA1: it can be questioned if machines that still have no SHA extensions are still used for performance-critical operations. Also, on contemporary architectures in general, there are many comparisons out there which indicate that even without hardware acceleration SHA1 is often faster than MD5 because of the latter's limited capability to make efficient use of modern processor's architectures.
The increased resistance of SHA1 against collisions might be noted as well, although it is not very important for this use case.
And thanks for maintaining this great tool!