Bugtraq: Re: SHA-1 broken

[Robert Sussland <robert () inkwood org>]

On Feb 16, 2005, at 4:56 AM, Gadi Evron wrote:

> Now, we've all seen this coming for a while.
> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html
>
> Where do we go from here?
We abandon the requirement of collision resistance. This is a strange 
requirement, and is not supported by experience. Collision resistance 
is not a "hard" problem in the sense that factoring large numbers or 
computing discrete logs is hard. Collision resistance in deterministic 
hash functions smells too much like generating entropy without secrets. 
I have no reason to believe that careful analysis of *any* publicly 
known deterministic many-to-one function will not allow me to produce a 
collision, assuming I control all inputs into the function.
From my point of view, the issue is what weaker assumption do we 
replace collision resistance with -- how about:
target collision resistance, with the "strength" of resistance equal to 
the average advantage an attacker would gain in matching a fixed 
target, as the target is averaged over all possible inputs in a measure 
space? Then, producing "rare" messages which could be targeted would 
not weaken the hash, as the probability of such messages occurring 
would be low.