[sclug] MD5 is compromised

[Will Dickson]

Hi all,

A group of Chinese cryptologists yesterday (17th) published 
an attack which basically defeats the MD5 "checksum" (ie. 
hash function) which is still widely used, inter alia, to 
detect tampering or corruption on software patches etc.

Demonstrated result is at http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/199.pdf

Full paper hasn't been published yet.

If you use MD5 for anything security-related you need to 
stop doing so. Replace with SHA-1.

(The same attack also breaks SHA-0 - an obsolete older 
version of SHA-1. This isn't directly a problem but if the 
attack can be extended to SHA-1 itself we've got big trouble.)


Will