Report of collision-generation with MD5

[Peter C. Lai]

Well while collisions are cryptographically significant, they don't
necessarily impact any operational security of the the hash. (Since the
collision merely means that there are possibly two inputs which will hash to 
the same digest). Where this could theoretically mean that someone could 
alter a signed message, we have to look at the chance that what was intended
to be altered will satisfy the conditions for the collision. The only 'real'
worry about this issue is that if MD5 is already cryptographically challenged
in this manner, it may be more possible to find a way to reverse the hash.

You can read the discussion here:
http://www.rtfm.com/movabletype/archives/2004_08.html#001053
http://www.rtfm.com/movabletype/archives/2004_03.html#000820

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 10:24:27AM -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.
> 
> Peace,
> david
> -- 
> David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
> Evidence of curmudgeonliness:  becoming irritated with the usage of the
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> performance, as opposed to "bandwidth" or "latency."
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-- 
Peter C. Lai
University of Connecticut
Dept. of Molecular and Cell Biology
Yale University School of Medicine
SenseLab | Research Assistant
http://cowbert.2y.net/