Skip to content

Warn that SHA-1 is practically broken! #8

@JRHaigh

Description

@JRHaigh

In 2005, February, an attack on full SHA-1 was first published, 211× faster than bruteforce. Schneier estimated that this would allow “a machine that cost $25M-$38M”, in 2005, to find an SHA-1 collision in 56 hours.
    In addition to another decade following Moore's law, some other attacks have since improved on the computational efficiency. Some rough calculations by Walker in 2012 estimated ~2.77M$ per collision in 2012 and projected ~700k$ per collision by 2015.
    On 2015-10-08, a freestart collision attack on SHA-1's compression function, with an example freestart collision, was published that requires only 257.5 SHA-1 evaluations per freestart collision, and this allowed the research team to more accurately update the cost estimate of a full collision:

“Concretely, we estimate the SHA-1 collision cost today (i.e., Fall 2015) between 75K$ and 120K$ renting Amazon EC2 cloud computing[.]”

    On 2017-02-23, an example full SHA-1 collision was published for the first time. Although this was the first published collision example of SHA-1 as a whole, the attack to produce it will have actually cost more than the use of the most efficient published SHA-1 collision attack. It requires 263.1 SHA-1 calculations rather than Stevens' 260 because the attack went beyond a mere example SHA-1 collision and applied the attack elaborately to forge a collision on PDF documents:

“[…] Furthermore, the prefix of the colliding messages was carefully chosen so that they allow an attacker to forge two PDF documents with the same SHA-1 hash yet that display arbitrarily-chosen distinct visual contents.
    We were able to find this collision by combining many special cryptanalytic techniques in complex ways and improving upon previous work. […]”

I suppose that having the ‘first published SHA-1 collision’ be a fancy PDF advertisement makes for a clever PR stunt that is expected to more than cover the roughly 8.6× extra cost of the forgery's greater computational complexity.
    Nonetheless, the raw SHA-1 collision cost will be well under 100k$ per collision by now – affordable for criminal syndicates.
    These risks must not be ignored. Hashr should warn the user about the risk of SHA-1 collisions whenever they is on the SHA-1 tab. If they is using the SHA-1 function then perhaps they didn't know that SHA-1 is insecure, hence they should be warned!

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions