MD5 collisions

MD5 collisions

Posted Jun 16, 2005 6:48 UTC (Thu) by beejaybee (guest, #1581)
Parent article: MD5 collisions

"Given the number of practical attacks on MD5, it may be time to move to a Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) approved hash algorithm, such as SHA-256, or SHA-512."

Assuming we can be persuaded that these are fundamentally more secure. My guess is that rather less effort has been directed at breaking these than MD5 and SHA-1 given that there is less practical value in breaking them.

"Note that vulnerabilities have recently been found in SHA-1"

Sure.

But isn't there a fundamental point here - if we sign a document with both MD5 and SHA-1, it becomes at least several orders of magnitude harder to fabricate a forgery, and several orders of magnitude more than 8 hours is reasonably safe - maybe more so than a relatively unresearched, untried algorithm.

Fact of the matter is, whatever algorithm is used, the possibility of hash collisions can _never_ be discounted.

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