News at 8: Attacks on MD5 getting better

[Ralf-Philipp Weinmann]

Seems like not only Ms. Wang and her team are able to practically 
produce MD5 collisions anymore. Vlastimil Klima recently described [1] 
his own research and experiments and allegedly is able to produce 
collisions on an off-the-shelf 1.6 GHz Pentium M at a rate of one every 
8 hours.

This, he concludes, is a speed-up of about a factor 3-6 over the Chinese 
team [to the crowd that can't wait till Eurocrypt 2005: see [2]].

Furthermore, he seems to be optimistic to be able to bring it down to 
about 2 minutes per collision on the same machine. *knock on wood*

I wonder how long it'll take till somebody comes up with a way to 
"calculate MD5 collisions by hand" :)

An now on to your regularly scheduled program...

Cheers,
Ralf

[1] V. Klima: Finding MD5 Collisions - a Toy For a Notebook
     http://cryptography.hyperlink.cz/md5/MD5_collisions.pdf

[2] X. Wang and H. Yu: How to Break MD5 and Other Hash Functions
     http://www.infosec.sdu.edu.cn/paper/md5-attack.pdf

-- 
Ralf-P. Weinmann <weinmann at cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>
TU Darmstadt, FB Informatik, FG Theoretische Informatik

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