MD5CRK

In cryptography, MD5CRK was a distributed effort (similar to distributed.net) launched by Jean-Luc Cooke and his company, CertainKey Cryptosystems, to demonstrate that the MD5 message digest algorithm is insecure by finding a collision two messages that produce the same MD5 hash. The project went live on March 1, 2004. The project ended on August 24, 2004 after researchers independently demonstrated a technique for generating collisions in MD5 using analytical methods by Xiaoyun Wang, Feng, Xuejia Lai, and Yu.[1] CertainKey awarded a 10,000 Canadian Dollar prize to Wang, Feng, Lai and Yu for their discovery.[2]

Pollard's Rho collision search for a single path

A technique called Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm was used to try to find a collision for MD5. The algorithm can be described by analogy with a random walk. Using the principle that any function with a finite number of possible outputs placed in a feedback loop will cycle, one can use a relatively small amount of memory to store outputs with particular structures and use them as "markers" to better detect when a marker has been "passed" before. These markers are called distinguished points, the point where two inputs produce the same output is called a collision point. MD5CRK considered any point whose first 32 bits were zeroes to be a distinguished point.

Complexity

The expected time to find a collision is not equal to where is the number of bits in the digest output. It is in fact , where is the number of function outputs collected.

For this project, the probability of success after MD5 computations can be approximated by: .

The expected number of computations required to produce a collision in the 128-bit MD5 message digest function is thus:

To give some perspective to this, using Virginia Tech's System X with a maximum performance of 12.25 Teraflops, it would take approximately seconds or about 3 weeks. Or for commodity processors at 2 gigaflops it would take 6,000 machines approximately the same amount of time.

See also

References

  1. Xiaoyun Wang, Dengguo Feng, Xuejia Lai, Hongbo Yu (17 August 2004). "Collisions for Hash Functions MD4, MD5, HAVAL-128 and RIPEMD".
  2. "Popular, Yet Obsolete, Banking Algorithm Broken". CertainKey News (Press release). 17 February 2005.

Further reading

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