More on Newly Broken SHA-1

AnonymousStudent writes "Details are out about the reported broken SHA-1 hash function. The findings are that SHA-1 is not collision free and can be broken in 2^69 attempts instead of 2^80. This is about 2000 times faster. With todays computing power and Moores Law, a SHA-1 hash does not last too long. Using a modified DES Cracker, for the small sum of up to $38M, SHA-1 can be broken in 56 hours, with current computing power. In 18 months, the cost should go down by half. Jon Callas, PGP's CTO, put it best: 'It's time to walk, but not run, to the fire exits. You don't see smoke, but the fire alarms have gone off.' As Schneier suggests, 'It's time for us all to migrate away from SHA-1.' Alternatives include SHA-256 and SHA-512."

Comments

Re:Collision free hash?

[mre5565]

With 160 bits of hash, the probability that two pieces of data will hash to the same value is incredibly low.

The width of hash has little to do with the probability of a collision by an attacker. The cleverness of the hash algorithm is the key to collision resistance. For example, a checksum is a hash that merely breaks the int into 160 bit chunks, adds each chunk to together, takes the lower 160 bits of the sum, resulting a 160 bit hash. It is trivial to find for any given message, multiple messages that checksum hash to the same value. Thus far, no one has proven they can do that with SHA-1 (or MD5 for that matter), at least not trivially.

Of course, once one has a clever algorithm, width of the hash can be a nice factor in building up its strength, assuming the hash algorithm lends itself to scaling that way, as SHA apparently does, with SHA-256, SHA-512 being available.

Of course, for random data corruption due to faulty hardware or software, a 160 bit checksum would be excellent (if costly) protection. But that isn't what we are talking about here.