Re:The hijacking flaw that lurked in Intel chips is worse th...
by technion on Sunday May 07, 2017 @03:24AM
(#14284303)
The other way to look at this is..
MD5 is known to be a poor option. And every few years the practicalities of attacking it increase. And when the type of attack described here does become practical, all we'll be hearing is one side saying "they had ten years to fix this" and another side saying "but experts we consulted said it was fine".
It is incredibly easy for whatever process builds a website with an MD5 hash of a download to instead display something else, so the cost trade off becomes:
Cost: Virtually nil
Mitigation: Currently minimal but has future potential
That a company would look at that and say "I guess we'll make a choice to stick with MD5" says something, even if it doesn't say the website downloads are easily compromised.
Alternatively, the parent comment could be pointing out that no hash signature that only exists on the download site itself offers value, and they would be better served offering a GPG signature or similar.
MD5 is known to be a poor option. And every few years the practicalities of attacking it increase. And when the type of attack described here does become practical, all we'll be hearing is one side saying "they had ten years to fix this" and another side saying "but experts we consulted said it was fine".
It is incredibly easy for whatever process builds a website with an MD5 hash of a download to instead display something else, so the cost trade off becomes:
Cost: Virtually nil Mitigation: Currently minimal but has future potential
That a company would look at that and say "I guess we'll make a choice to stick with MD5" says something, even if it doesn't say the website downloads are easily compromised.
Alternatively, the parent comment could be pointing out that no hash signature that only exists on the download site itself offers value, and they would be better served offering a GPG signature or similar.