Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2004/264
Musings on the Wang et al. MD5 Collision
Philip Hawkes and Michael Paddon and Gregory G. Rose
Abstract: Wang et al. caused great excitement at CRYPTO2004
when they announced a collision for MD5~\cite{R92_MD5}.
This paper is examines the internal differences and conditions
required for the attack to be successful. There are a large number
of conditions that must be satisfied, thus indicating Wang at al. have found a
clever way to generate message pairs for which the conditions are
satisfied.
The large number of conditions suggests that an attacker cannot use these differentials to
cause second pre-image
attacks with complexity less than generic attacks. Initial
examination also suggests that an attacker cannot cause such
collisions for HMAC-MD5 with complexity less than generic attacks.
Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / hash functions, cryptanalysis
Date: received 13 Oct 2004
Contact author: phawkes at qualcomm com
Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation
Note: Disclaimer: This document notes some observations of the authors regarding the collisions generated by Wang et al..
We do not claim to have any new discoveries in this paper.
However, we hope that this paper provides a useful explanation until the time when Wang et al. publish a
detailed analysis of their discoveries.
Version: 20041014:104208 (All versions of this report)
Short URL: ia.cr/2004/264
[ Cryptology ePrint archive ]