Paper Now Available - The Cost of SHA-1 Collisions reduced to 2^{52}

Australian researchers Cameron McDonald, Philip Hawkes and Josef Pieprzyk recently announced at the Eurocrypt 2009 conference a new attack to find collisions in SHA-1 requiring only 2^{52} operations. A premilimary version of the paper is now available here on the eprint service of the IACR.

This new result decreases the cost of a collision attack by a factor of over 2000 as compared to previous methods. The researchers note that “practical collisions are within resources of a well funded organisation”. An article by the Register provides some more background.