Report of collision-generation with MD5

Wed Aug 18 10:32:38 PDT 2004

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 10:25:16AM -0700, David Wolfskill wrote:
> Just got a pointer to this via ACM "TechNews Alert" for today:
> 
> http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2004-6/0818w.html#item2
> 
> Seems that "... French computer scientist Antoine Joux reported on
> Aug. 12 his discovery of a flaw in the MD5 algorithm, which is often
> used with digital signatures...."
> 
> There's more in the article cited above.

Worse, they suspect a possible collision in SHA1 as well.

I think we're beginning to see the possibility that entropy generation
and cryptography will never truly be secure; it's just that we can
invent complexity faster than we can explore and/or explain it, so
showstopping bugs are always lagging deployment.

I'm waiting for the first quantum crypto crack to be announced. ;)

-- 
Mark C. Langston            GOSSiP Project          Sr. Unix SysAdmin
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