Hashcash and the cracking of SHA1
"David Fuelling" <[email protected]> Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:14:48 -0500
| Newsgroups | gmane.mail.spam.hashcash |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <000601c74308$33326ad0$f964a8c0@Genesis> |
Hey List, Sorry if this has been covered in the last two years, but I just want to be sure I've got my facts straight. So, sometime in 2005, the SHA1 algorithm was cracked by a Chinese mathematician. Bruce Schneier blogs about it here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html In a nutshell: "Collisions in the the full SHA-1 in 2**69 hash operations, much less than the brute-force attack of 2**80 operations based on the hash length." I'm wondering if this has any implications on Hashcash. From my way of thinking, if the supposed "crack" still takes 2^69 operations (instead of the typical 2^80 via brute force), that's still going to be a lot *longer* than computing a partial hash collision that might take seconds or minutes (as is the case in Hashcash). I guess I'm just wanting to be sure that Hashcash isn't somehow vulnerable in its current form. I don't think it is, but figured I'd ping the list just to be sure. Thanks! David