3 ms·
Understanding that this is a naive outsider perspective, I find it strange that it's any sort of emergency when a single collision has yet to be produced. And t
by orblivion 12y ago
Understanding that this is a naive outsider perspective, I find it strange that it's any sort of emergency when a single collision has yet to be produced. And then, does the latest hash collision attack allow you to make a collision with a _specific_ target or just make a collision in general? Finally, even if you hit the target with some junk that happens to hash to the same thing, is it going to be in correct file format, and within an acceptable size? It seems like there are a handful of hurdles for the bad guys to go over before we're in danger.
I know crypto is not to be taken lightly, and I'm glad people would rather be safe than sorry, and I'll avoid SHA-1 in my own personal security use (`sha256sum` is sha-2 right?). I'm just curious.
- paulannesley 12y ago> when a single collision has yet to be produced No collisions published to the public doesn't mean no collisions have been found. As the article says; “we should assume that the worst vulnerabilities go undisclosed.”
- PeterisP 12y agoThe point is that currently producing a single collision may cost a couple million dollars of brute force for now. So we should expect it to be used (there are attacks where that much money is invested, either a very valuable target or very many low-value targets), but we should expect to see one only after a highly targeted attack is detected and analyized - in the case of Flame, those steps took a few years. Some government agency MITM'ing major social sites or email providers would be rather possible at that cost.
- spatz 12y agoWhen a collision is produced it will be too late. The time to act is before that happens.
- orblivion 12y agoI guess that's the surprising part. I figured that that's just the first hurdle, there's still the file length and format.