Practical Exploits of Broken MD5 Algorithm

jose parinas writes "A practical sample of an MD5 exploit can be found, with source code included,in codeproject, a site for .Net programmers. The intent of the demos is to demonstrate a very specific type of attack that exploits the inherent trust of an MD5 hash. It's sort of a semi-social engineering attack. At Microsoft, the MD5 hash functions are banned. The main problem is that the attack is directed to the distribution of software process, as you can understand reading the paper, Considered Harmful Someday. Some open source programs, like RPM, use MD5, and in many open source distributions MD5 is used as check sum."

Comments

Re:So if you need a freely available hash algorith

[MaGogue]

Unfortunately there is no way of guaranteeing they wont be found next month.

Re:So if you need a freely available hash algorith

[amodm]

pardon me if i might sound redundant or ignorant, but why shouldn't md5 be considered a free algorithm ?

sha1 creaky at the edges

[samjam]

sha1 creaky at the edges, which, AFAIK is used by GIT.

Perhaps SCO will get their source code into the kernel by financing SHA1 collisions?

Sam