Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2005-01-05 Thread Ben Laurie
C. Scott Ananian wrote: On Wed, 22 Dec 2004, Ben Laurie wrote: Blimey. Finally. An attack I can actually believe in. Excellent. D131DD02C5E6EEC4693D9A0698AFF95C2FCAB58712467EAB4004583EB8FB7F8955AD340609F4B30283E488832571415A085125E8F7CDC99FD91DBDF280373C5BD8823E3156348F5BAE6DACD436C919C6DD53E2B487D

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2005-01-04 Thread Zooko O'Whielacronx
Something that is interesting about this issue is that it involves transitive vulnerability. If there are only two actors there is no issue. If Alice is the user and Bob is the software maintainer and Bob is bad, then Alice will be exploited regardless of the hash function. If Alice is the us

RE: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2005-01-04 Thread Anton Stiglic
>David Wagner wrote: >> Ben Laurie writes: > > >> Or, even more contrived, imagine that img1.jpg looks >> like a completely normal JPG file, but img2.jpg exploits some buffer >> overrun in the startup screen's JPG decoder to overwrite the program's >> image with some other malicious code. >> >> Su

solution, Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread Ed Gerck
Ben Laurie wrote: David Wagner wrote: To give one contrived example, imagine that the Windows 2010 binary comes with an image file that is displayed as part of the splash start screen. Imagine that the graphic designer is allowed to supply that image, but the graphic designer has no other authoriz

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread Ben Laurie
John Kelsey wrote: From: Ben Laurie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Dec 22, 2004 12:24 PM To: David Wagner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com Subject: Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks" ... Assuming you could find a collision s.t. the resulting decryptio

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread John Kelsey
>From: Ben Laurie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Sent: Dec 22, 2004 12:24 PM >To: David Wagner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com >Subject: Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks" ... >Assuming you could find a collision s.t. the resulting decry

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread Ben Laurie
James A. Donald wrote: -- On 15 Dec 2004 at 8:51, Ben Laurie wrote: People seem to be having a hard time grasping what I'm trying to say, so perhaps I should phrase it as a challenge: find me a scenario where you can use an MD5 collision to mount an attack in which I could not mount an equally

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread Ben Laurie
David Wagner wrote: Ben Laurie writes: Indeed, but what's the point? If you control the binary, just distribute the malicious version in the first place. Where this argument breaks down is that someone might have partial but not total control over the binary. This partial control might not be en

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread Ben Laurie
David Wagner wrote: Ben Laurie writes: Dan Kaminsky's recent posting seems to have caused some excitement, but I really can't see why. In particular, the idea of having two different executables with the same checksum has attracted attention. But the only way I can see to exploit this would be t

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread Jon Callas
So, are you sure there can never be a program which allows such an exploit? I've seen programs that had embedded components (state machines in particular) which were not easily human-readable, and had themselves been generated by computer. And even large graphics, sound, or video sequences ca

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread Ondrej Mikle
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:06:10 -0500 (GMT-05:00), John Kelsey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > So, are you sure there can never be a program which allows such an exploit? > I've seen programs that had embedded components (state machines in > particular) which were not easily human-readable, and had

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread Ben Laurie
Jay Sulzberger wrote: On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Ben Laurie wrote: Ondrej Mikle wrote: [snipped many assertions without supporting evidence that MD5 cracks improve attacks] So, to exploit this successfully, you need code that cannot or will not be inspected. My contention is that any such code is untru

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 'attacks'

2004-12-22 Thread Ben Laurie
C. Scott Ananian wrote: On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Tim Dierks wrote: Here's an example, although I think it's a stupid one, and agree with [...] I send you a binary (say, a library for doing AES encryption) which you test exhaustively using black-box testing. The black-box testing would obviously be the

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread Ben Laurie
John Kelsey wrote: So, to exploit this successfully, you need code that cannot or will not be inspected. My contention is that any such code is untrusted anyway, so being able to change its behaviour on the basis of embedded bitmap changes is a parlour trick. You may as well have it ping a website

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-22 Thread James A. Donald
-- On 15 Dec 2004 at 8:51, Ben Laurie wrote: > People seem to be having a hard time grasping what I'm trying > to say, so perhaps I should phrase it as a challenge: find me > a scenario where you can use an MD5 collision to mount an > attack in which I could not mount an equally effective attac

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 'attacks'

2004-12-22 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Tim Dierks wrote: Here's an example, although I think it's a stupid one, and agree with [...] I send you a binary (say, a library for doing AES encryption) which you test exhaustively using black-box testing. The black-box testing would obviously be the mistake. How can you te

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 'attacks'

2004-12-22 Thread Sidney Markowitz
This isn't worked out enough to be a proof of concept, but I can imagine a piece of code that has a comment "This can't overflow because value X computed from the magic bits table will always be between A and B. Get 0.1% speed boost by leaving out range check here but don't change magic bits".

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-15 Thread Ben Laurie
Adam Back wrote: Is this the case? Can't we instead start with code C and malicious C' and try to find a collision on H(C||B) == H(C'||B') after trying 2^64 B values we'll find such a collision by the birthday principle. Indeed, but that is not the attack suggested. Now we can have people review a

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 'attacks'

2004-12-15 Thread Tim Dierks
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:51:29 +, Ben Laurie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > People seem to be having a hard time grasping what I'm trying to say, so > perhaps I should phrase it as a challenge: find me a scenario where you > can use an MD5 collision to mount an attack in which I could not mount > a

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-15 Thread Jay Sulzberger
On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Ben Laurie wrote: Ondrej Mikle wrote: On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 14:43:24 +, Ben Laurie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: But the only way I can see to exploit this would be to have code that did different things based on the contents of some bitmap. My contention is that if the code is

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-15 Thread John Kelsey
>From: Ben Laurie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Sent: Dec 14, 2004 9:43 AM >To: Cryptography <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks" >Dan Kaminsky's recent posting seems to have caused some excitement, but >I really can't see why. In particular, the idea of having two differen

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-15 Thread Ben Laurie
Adam Back wrote: Well the people doing the checking (a subset of the power users) may say "I checked the source and it has this checksum", and another user may download that checksum and be subject to MITM and not know it. Or I could mail you the source and you would check it with checksum and comp

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-15 Thread Adam Back
Is this the case? Can't we instead start with code C and malicious C' and try to find a collision on H(C||B) == H(C'||B') after trying 2^64 B values we'll find such a collision by the birthday principle. Now we can have people review and attest to the correctness of code C, and then we can MITM a

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-15 Thread Bill Frantz
On 12/14/04, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ben Laurie) wrote: >Dan Kaminsky's recent posting seems to have caused some excitement, but >I really can't see why. In particular, the idea of having two different >executables with the same checksum has attracted attention. > >But the only way I can see to explo

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-15 Thread Ben Laurie
Bill Frantz wrote: On 12/14/04, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ben Laurie) wrote: Dan Kaminsky's recent posting seems to have caused some excitement, but I really can't see why. In particular, the idea of having two different executables with the same checksum has attracted attention. But the only way I can s

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-15 Thread Ben Laurie
Adam Back wrote: I thought the usual attack posited when one can find a collision on a source checksum is to make the desired change to source, then tinker with something less obvious and more malleable like lsbits of a UI image file until you find your collision on two input source packages. Quite

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-15 Thread Adam Back
Well the people doing the checking (a subset of the power users) may say "I checked the source and it has this checksum", and another user may download that checksum and be subject to MITM and not know it. Or I could mail you the source and you would check it with checksum and compare checksum to

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-14 Thread Adam Back
I thought the usual attack posited when one can find a collision on a source checksum is to make the desired change to source, then tinker with something less obvious and more malleable like lsbits of a UI image file until you find your collision on two input source packages. Adam On Tue, Dec 14,

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-14 Thread Ben Laurie
Ondrej Mikle wrote: On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 14:43:24 +, Ben Laurie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: But the only way I can see to exploit this would be to have code that did different things based on the contents of some bitmap. My contention is that if the code is open, then it will be obvious that it d

Re: The Pointlessness of the MD5 "attacks"

2004-12-14 Thread Ondrej Mikle
On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 14:43:24 +, Ben Laurie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > But the only way I can see to exploit this would be to have code that > did different things based on the contents of some bitmap. My contention > is that if the code is open, then it will be obvious that it does > "somethi