Fwd: Potential SHA 1 Hack Using Distributed Computing - Near Miss(es) May be Good Enough

[Paul Hoffman]

At 11:31 PM +0200 8/14/07, Christian Rechberger wrote:
>The mentioned article is indeed confusing, the information in there 
>took apparently several hops.

Welcome to the world of public cryptography! :-) At least I haven't 
seen anyone so far suggest that you will find pre-images.

>To address your questions: Indeed, we have our own "path", but more 
>importantly we developed a new method to speed-up generation and 
>testing of candidate message pairs and apply it to SHA-1. The 
>resulting work factor is still quite high, hence we ask for 
>contributions via the BOINC framework.

Is there any estimation of how high? Specifically, do you believe 
there is a good chance of having less work effort than the current 
Wang strategy? For example, if you are sure that your result will be 
around 2^70, well that is interesting in theory but probably not 
worth any publicity you have gotten so far. If you are sure it will 
be around 2^55, I'll certainly give you some of my spare CPU cycles.

>More information on cryptanalytic details, type of collision, and 
>resulting work factor will appear later this year.

That's good to hear. It would also be interesting if you could keep a 
running meter of approximately how much work you are getting from the 
participants. This isn't nearly as "sexy" as finding ETs or even 
protein folding...

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com