Re:The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1
by comicjk on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:38AM
(#21981565)
Bridge engineers don't have to fear the progress of science working against them, but computer security is not alone here. Consider designing body armor or military aircraft and hoping that the state of the art will stay the same! An adversary who can use the progress of science against you is always dangerous. Computer security has been rather lucky so far: the asymmetry between hashing and cracking a hash, for example, is much more favorable to the defense than the balance between bulletproof vests and bullets.
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Re:The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1
by WorldMaker on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @01:06PM
(#21982645)
On a long enough time scale Bridge Engineers still have to worry about decay, entropy, collisions. Some of that can even be attributed to the "progress of science", as bridges have collapsed because earlier assumptions were invalidated by larger trucks, for instance.
An issue so far for computer security is less that decay and entropy happen, but that they happen so fast that the timescales are decades or even years rather than lifetimes.
Re:The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1
by candu on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @01:41PM
(#21983099)
This is a great point in general: sometimes the problem isn't an adversary using knowledge in your field against you, it's the unintended consequences of progress / changes in adjacent fields.
It also underscores that, when dealing with things like passwords, it's helpful to be able to seamlessly upgrade to more robust methods down the line, e.g. "if this password hash was generated using the old method, check the login using that method but rehash and update the database using the new method after authentication."
Re:The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1
by microtherion on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @09:47PM
(#21987808)
> Consider designing body armor or military aircraft and hoping that the state of the art will stay the same!
This was particularly a problem for castles vs. the progress of artillery, because those were supposed to have a rather long lifetime.