Displaying items by tag: SHA1

More attacks on SHA-1 can be expected after a security researcher took apart the PDFs which were released last week to illustrate the means of breaking the algorithm detailed by a Dutch team and Google.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds says two sets of patches have been posted for the distributed version control system git to mitigate against SHA-1 attacks which are based on the method that Dutch and Google engineers detailed last week.

The SHA-1 collision attack unveiled on Thursday has claimed its first victim, with the version control system used by the WebKit browser engine becoming corrupted after the two proof-of-concept PDF files that were released by the researchers were uploaded to the repository.

Organisations and commercial firms have 90 days to switch to safer cryptographic hashes after researchers from a Dutch institute and Google jointly announced a method to crack the SHA-1 algorithm that has been used for a long time to verify the authenticity of digital documents.

Trust is an Internet cornerstone, built on the belief that messages and files freely exchanged on the Internet are authentic. Foundational to that are hashing functions that transform messages and files into a short set of bits. But what happens if cyber criminals break these hashing functions?