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New, Faster Attack against SHA-1 Revealed

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the not-so-safe-anymore dept.

VxSote writes "According to Bruce Schneier's blog, a team of Chinese cryptographers has announced new results against SHA-1 that speed up the time required to find collisions compared to their previously published attack. Schneier says that a SHA-1 collision search is now 'squarely in the realm of feasibility,' and that further improvements are expected."

2 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Two questions... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think that the greatest threat in this case is not terrorists but the institutions such as government and security forces. Terrorists have a great interest in keeping their own transmissions secure but little interest in the communications of others.

    Their tagets are soft, security is fairly low and information can be obtained using people on the street.

    Counterintelligence is a game played by large beauracracies who are at peace at the moment but would really like not to be. It involves the use of large ammounts of resources for the main purpose of maintaining the status quo. Terrorists are not interested in the status quo, they want things to change.

  2. Anonymous "team of Chinese cryptographers" by clap_hands · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Have you ever noticed how you never hear the names of these Chinese researchers...Professor Xiaoyun Wang and her colleagues (for SHA-1, Yiqun Lisa Yin and Hongbo Yu) have broken the greater share of the popular hash functions: MD4, MD5, SHA-0, SHA-1, RIPEMD...and the only name that gets mentioned is "Bruce Schneier reports that Chinese cryptographers...". Not to belittle Schneier, but what these anonymous "Chinese cryptographers" have achieved is exceedingly significant in the field of cryptography, and the least we can do is mention their names occasionally, right?

    Even if they are unpronouncable ;-)