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Musings on the Wang et al. MD5 Collision

Authors:
Philip Hawkes
Michael Paddon
Gregory G. Rose
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URL: http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/264
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Abstract: Wang et al. caused great excitement at CRYPTO2004 when they announced a collision for MD5~\cite{R92_MD5}. This paper is examines the internal differences and conditions required for the attack to be successful. There are a large number of conditions that must be satisfied, thus indicating Wang at al. have found a clever way to generate message pairs for which the conditions are satisfied. The large number of conditions suggests that an attacker cannot use these differentials to cause second pre-image attacks with complexity less than generic attacks. Initial examination also suggests that an attacker cannot cause such collisions for HMAC-MD5 with complexity less than generic attacks.
BibTeX
@misc{eprint-2004-12231,
  title={Musings on the Wang  et al. MD5 Collision},
  booktitle={IACR Eprint archive},
  keywords={secret-key cryptography / hash functions, cryptanalysis},
  url={http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/264},
  note={ phawkes@qualcomm.com 12705 received 13 Oct 2004},
  author={Philip Hawkes and Michael Paddon and Gregory  G. Rose},
  year=2004
}