[p2p-hackers] colliding md5 hashes of human-meaningful documents

[Eric M. Hopper]

On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 11:14 -0300, zooko at zooko.com wrote:
> There is nothing theoretically surprising about this, but hopefully its 
> concreteness and the accompanying scenario will make an impression on people 
> on people.  The same technique should work to generate two documents with 
> identical SHA1 hashes.
> 
> http://www.cits.rub.de/MD5Collisions/

I'm so happy someone is doing this.  I try to keep telling people that a
broken hash function is actually worse than no hash function at all, but
nobody pays any attention and they largely call me an alarmist twit.

Mostly, it worries me that people won't think through the implications
of the break carefully enough and make some mistake with unforeseen
consequences in the future.  Doing it right is a lot harder than most
people think, and most people are better off with a fairly simple set of
rules than trying to think through the ins and outs of a complex
situation like a partially broken hash function.

The fact that most hash functions so far are vulnerable to extension
attacks is bad enough.

*sigh*,
-- 
The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they
be properly armed.  -- Alexander Hamilton
-- Eric Hopper (hopper at omnifarious.org  http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper) --
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