Subject: Re: SHA1 hash safety

From: David Meybohm <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 14:56:53 -0400

On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 06:48:57PM -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, David Meybohm wrote:
> 
> >But doesn't this require assuming the distribution of MD5 is uniform,
> >and don't the papers finding collisions in less show it's not? So, your
> >birthday-argument for calculating the probability wouldn't apply, because
> >it rests on the assumption MD5 is uniform, and it isn't.
> 
> No, the collision papers don't show this at all.

I didn't mean they showed it directly. I meant by finding collisions in
MD5 quickly, MD5 would have to have some non-uniformity. But that's
nevertheless wrong because uniformness and collision finding ability
aren't related. Sorry to have wasted everyone's time.

Dave