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August 18, 2005
Waiting for the sky to fall
CRYPTO 2005 is over and SHA-1 hasn't totally collapsed yet. On the bad side, it's now about 32 times easier to find a collision than it was a year ago (well, more like 50 times easier due to Moore's Law) and Wang et al. think the attack can be improved further. On the other hand, a lot more work has been put into hash functions this year than last and so one might imagine that the fact that the bar has only been moved 5 bits is some kind of evidence that it's going to be a harder to make much forward progress.This kind of uncertainty is the unfortunate price of not having any non-ad-hoc theory of hash function security.
Posted by ekr at August 18, 2005 9:43 PM | Filed under: