7 - A Survey of Chosen-Prefix Collision Attacks

Summary

In Chapter 7, A Survey of Chosen-Prefix Collision Attacks, Marc Stevens surveys the technical advances, impact and usage of collision attacks for the most widely used cryptographic hash functions. Cryptographic hash function are the Swiss army knives within cryptography and are used in many applications including digital signature schemes, message authentication codes, password hashing, cryptocurrencies and content-addressable storage. Stevens was one of the driving forces in turning initial weaknesses in the compression function into practical attacks against various widely deployed protocols relying on hash function collision resistance for their security. In Chapter 7 he explains how each scenario involves the development of slightly different ideas to exploit weaknesses in especially MD5.