A collaboration between Google’s research unit and a Dutch institute on Thursday cracked a widely used cryptographic technology SHA-1.
This technology that has been one of the key building blocks of internet security, is known as Secure Hash Algorithm 1 or currently used to verify the integrity of digital files and signatures that secure credit card transactions as well as Git open-source software repositories.
Researchers were able to demonstrate a “collision attack” using two different PDF files with the same SHA-1 fingerprint, but with different visible content.
Moving forward, it’s more urgent than ever for security practitioners to migrate to safer cryptographic hashes such as SHA-256 and SHA-3.
