Australian researchers have described a new and faster way of provoking collisions of the SHA-1 hash algorithm. With their method, a collision can be found using only 252 attempts. This makes practical attacks feasible and could have an impact on the medium-term use of the algorithm in digital signatures.
SHA-1 is used to verify data authenticity in many applications. To reduce the complexity of the collision process, the researchers combined a boomerang attack with the search for differential paths.
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