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A comment on The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1. Parent comment

Re:The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1 by userbinator on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:00PM (#21988171)
It's funny to see how different the various people here have on the definition of "trivial". 10 years ago, I generated MD5 collisions in a few minutes with a tiny little executable I downloaded. That's what I call trivial.

If I had some DES-encrypted files that I'd lost the key to, and they were important enough that I needed their contents, I would probably be happy that I could crack the key today and recover them if I spent enough, but doing so would still not be "trivial".

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Re:The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1 by ReidZB on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @12:49AM (#21988707)
Oh, sure, maybe trivial isn't the best word for it, but it's all relative (to me). $20k is remarkably cheap for a practical cryptographic attack compared to the rest of the field, and there's plenty of software to do it, and it's been done before (many times).

Apparently there's even a SaaS offering to do it for you in some cases (for staggeringly cheap, like $300), but I had no idea that existed when I wrote my comment.

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