Git 2.56, expected in late September, offers incremental improvements including a new git history drop subcommand and enhanced git refs commands, while the community debates whether to proceed with Git 3.0, which would introduce breaking changes including a switch from SHA-1 to SHA-256 hashing for security.
NIST announced a $12,288 bounty in 2023 to crack five SHA-1 hashes of English sentences used to generate seeds for NIST elliptic curves, which power modern cryptography. The original creator, Dr. Jerry Solinas, passed away in early 2023 without revealing the phrases, leaving a cryptographic mystery that some fear could indicate intentionally weak curves.