Wow…here’s a reference to a new paper describing “a considerable speedup of MD5 collision generation. His improvements of Wang’s method enables one to make MD5 collisions typically in one minute on a PC; sometimes it takes a few minutes, and sometimes only a few seconds.”

As noted in the paper, the “few seconds” attacks have a reasonable probability, and if they succeed, they are quick enough to allow collision finding during protocol executions that rely on MD5. Zoinks. It’s amazing, really; hardware improvements give steady, compounding, year to year improvement in the speed of cryptanalysis. But the truly revolutionary change comes out of thin air, from the minds of mathematicians who just come up with A Better Way. Makes me so jealous that it hurts sometimes! *grin*

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