I'm sad to announce that MD5 is no longer considered secure. A recent research found how to produce collisions in MD5 (from md5sum) in a small amount of time (1 hour + 5 minutes).
Why does it bother us? Well, it is now easy to find two pieces of code A and B, where A is good code and B is malicious code, enter A to the official tree, have someone compute the MD5sum (and even sign it), and then change the source code in some mirror to B. ah? In simple words - do not use MD5 for security hashing. That's it. It's unsafe. BTW, the same problem exist with MD4, RIPEMD (a variant of MD5). Short term solution: use sha-1, sha-256 (or sha-512 if you paranoid). Long term solution: use tiger or some AES-based solution. (small and interesting comment: currently the collisions are made with the initial value supplied by Bruce Scheneier's book, which are wrong. To change it to the real MD5 is a bit of technical work. This is another good reason to avoid Bruce's book). -- Orr Dunkelman, [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that reason infallibly be faulty" -- Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Spammers: http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~orrd/spam.html GPG fingerprint: C2D5 C6D6 9A24 9A95 C5B3 2023 6CAB 4A7C B73F D0AA (This key will never sign Emails, only other PGP keys.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://www.haifux.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
