$10M breaks MD5 in 24 days

Perry E. Metzger perry at imsi.com
Sun Aug 28 17:01:30 PDT 1994



Phil Karn says:
> >Well, I suppose this demonstrates that the NSA knew what they were
> >doing when they set the SHA's length to 160 bits. Let it never be said
> >that they aren't right on top of everything...
> 
> On the other hand, I can't imagine that NSA is unaware that strong
> cryptographic hash functions designed for authentication are also
> useful building blocks for a confidentiality cipher. Which might make
> them less than wholly enthusiastic about doing their best on a public
> standard like SHA.

True enough. However, we don't have a lot of alternatives right now.
MD6, anyone?

.pm






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