SHA-1 broken! MD5 is next...

I was catching up on my SC Magazine reading (been falling behind. Why do I subscribe to it anyway?) when I read something damn interesting. A team of Chinese cryptographers broke SHA-1 via brute force? It was supposed to be mathematically impossible to break SHA-1 (2^80 computations or 1 million million million million) with current or any future technology.

However, this team managed to figure out a "collision" in 2^33 computations (about 9 billion computations only!) What is a collision? Ok basically a hash is used to generate a "short form" of something eg an email or credit card number. Ideally this hash is unique, meaning 2 emails cannot create the same hash. Of coz this is ideally... but if u heng suay then it's possible to get 2 identical hashes. If 2 different things get the same hash, it's a "collision".

What's even more interesting is that MD5 is considered weaker than SHA-1. MD5 is this team's next target. Seems like the cryptographic world is seeing a shakeup and revamp, starting with AES and now a new hash?

Guess it's time systems stop using SHA-1 and move to SHA-256 and SHA-512. Too bad I didn't read of this sooner.

An honour?

Oh I was just informed that for some strange reason one of my articles was featured in a Singapore politics website, The Void Deck. The article itself can be found here.

I guess it's in a way heartening that people read my blog. Of coz I never intended to "blogwhore" myself, unlike some other unmentioned blogs out there.

BTW, look forward to more news of yet another hack success by the Beng Hacks team soon!

Sony gets pwned

The most recent news that affected me greatly was that Sony got sued US$80mil by Immersion Inc over PS2's rumble technology, which Immersion patented. Not only that, the courts ordered all PS2 console sales to cease. That's a BIG blow to Sony. They should have settled out of court like Microsoft did with their XBox (which apparently also used Immersion's tech). Wonder what this means from now on.

On the hackfront, recently there was news of a conclusion to a DDOS attack against Lufthansa the german airline. The courts will soon decide if the "activist demonstration" by the hacker constituted a hack. The guy Andreas-Thomas Vogel flooded the carrier's website with hits essentially bringing it down (kinda like what happens when SIA releases $98 tickets).

It'll be interesting to see if any "activism" will take place during the upcoming World Cyber Games 2005 held here in November as well as the IMF conference next year.