At 6:41 PM 5/18/96, Bill Stewart wrote:

...

I was talking to someone who was talking to someone (have I said this is a rumor yet?) who was solicited for comment by a Very Famous Reporter about the fact that DSS, the Digital Signature Standard, promulgated by NIST, I believe, had been broken.

MD5 is at least weakened, maybe broken; there's an abstract by Hans Dobbertin that says something about generating collisions, and gives an example

DSS uses SHA, which isn't affected by the Dobbertin finding. I believe that you would have to solve the discrete logarithm problem to break DSS; this would imply being able to break Diffie-Hellman and a number of other crypto algorithms. (However, I'm not certain that it's been shown that breaking DSS is equivalent to breaking discrete logarithms.) - Tim Tim Dierks - Software Haruspex - tim@dierks.org "That's the trouble with technology. It attracts people who have nothing to say." - Muffey Kibbey, mother [Wall Street Journal, May 10 1996]