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

Security Through Obscurity

[Trolling4Columbine]

"Encryption" is just another flawed method of concealing information behind obfuscated algorithms. History has proven time and again that such techniques are inevitably compromised, and therefore useless.

My suggestion: if you want your data to be protected that well, don't transfer it over electronic media.