MD5 collisions

MD5 collisions

Posted Jun 16, 2005 12:42 UTC (Thu) by pdc (guest, #1353)
In reply to: MD5 collisions by copsewood
Parent article: MD5 collisions

This is one reason why people should be trained to understand the difference between plain text (in the programmer's sense of the word) and more complicated formats like PostScript and Microsoft Word, where a lot of the bytes in the file are invisible in the rendered version. If you look at the PostScript documents used in the paper, the inclusion of invisible binary data is quite obvious; a plain text document would not be vulnerable to this particular attack. Programs for signing documents could be designed to refuse to sign anything except the actual words.

The trick is we want to use signing of binaries to help us avoid trojan-horse device-drivers being put on company's web sites, and in this case, the possibility of adding a binary lump to the executable in order to fiddle the MD5 hash is unavoidable. We could instead insist on drivers being supplied as signed source code to be compiled by the installer (Gentoo style) but in practice source code is a difficult read so it is not likely to be scrutinized in detail by the person who has downloaded it. I can just about imagine a code-signing protocol where a canonical version of the source code is automatically extracted (stripping comments) so that hiding binary junk in the code to fiddle the digest is harder because it has to be compilable.

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