[42155] in Cypherpunks
Re: MD5 weakness ? [was Re: Netscape Logic Bomb detailed by IETF]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andy Brown)
Tue Oct 24 13:02:47 1995
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 16:30:53 +0000 (GMT)
From: Andy Brown <asb@nexor.co.uk>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <9510241442.AA12411@all.net>
On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, Dr. Frederick B. Cohen wrote:
> [...]
> In the case of the trust being placed in MD5 by Netscape, the assumption
> being made (without adequate support as far as I can tell) is that an
> MD5 checksum cannot be forced, through a chosen plaintext attack, to
> yield checksums of 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, ... on up to enough primes to
> allow the known plaintext attack that gets the RSA private key used to
> authenticate messages. As far as I am aware (and I may not be aware of
> everything) there is no reference work to support this assumption. If
> the assumption is wrong, then the whole SSL can fall to a selected
> plaintext attack launchable (presumably) through those general purpose
> Java aplets we have heard so much about.
The above paragraph is complete crap.
- Andy, speaking only for himself.
