Meaningful MD5 Collisions

mrogers writes "Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have found a way to produce MD5 collisions between human-meaningful documents. This could be used to obtain a digital signature on one document and then transfer it to another. The same technique is theoretically applicable to other hash functions based on the Merkle-Damgård structure, such as SHA-1." From the article: "Recently, the world of cryptographic hash functions has turned into a mess. A lot of researchers announced algorithms ("attacks") to find collisions for common hash functions such as MD5 and SHA-1 (see [B+, WFLY, WY, WYY-a, WYY-b]). For cryptographers, these results are exciting - but many so-called 'practitioners' turned them down as 'practically irrelevant'."

Comments

Re:Wow...this is nerdy even for /.

[k4_pacific]

Basically, they used a high-powered particle accelerator to create MD5 collisions between human-meaningful documents, thus forging the missing link between thermodynamic and informational entropy.

I hope that clears things up.

Re:huh?

[Captain BooBoo]

Are you kidding? ANY article with the word "hash" in it is going to grab the attention of even the weakest synapse. ôô

Re:do you know how big 2^128 is?

[RealityMogul]

2^128 is huge. It's larger by far than the number of all the files in all of the computers in the world

Pfft, let me show you my porn collection.

Perhaps its time for another layer of protection.

[vonstauf]

We could just couple it with another widely used industry standard