Collision Search Attacks

This
story was first broken last night by Wikinews! We have a
feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more out of Chinese computer scientists
(and Wikinews) in the
next
few
years…

Security experts are warning that a security flaw has been found
in a powerful
data encryption
algorithm,
dubbed SHA-1,
by
a team
of scientists
from Shandong University in China. The three scientists are circulating
a paper within the cryptographic research community that describes
successful tests of a technique that could greatly reduce the speed with
which SHA-1
could be compromised.

SHA-1 is used to create signatures by most of the popular security protocols
on the Internet, including SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and PGP (Profile,
Products, Articles) (Pretty Good Privacy), he said.

A research team of three scientists: Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo
Yu, is circulating a paper called "Collision Search Attacks on SHA-1" that
describes methods for creating so-called "collisions" with the SHA-1
algorithm 2,000 times more quickly than had been possible before.

from Infoworld