Quantifying the strength of hash functions



AbstractIn an estimate made by Bruce Schneier, it is predicted that the SHA-1 Hash algorithm will be cryptographically broken within the year 2018. This has will have a huge impact on the security infrastructure used today as SHA-1 is used extensively in many areas.
The report will outline the major areas where SHA-1 is used and offer a risk analysis based on theoretical models, previous examples and a practical implementation on a high performance computing cluster, and while no concrete, working attacks were produced, the hardware capabilities of the current generation were demonstrated, and used to reinforce the point, that 2nd pre-image attacks on SHA-1 are still not possible.
TypeMaster's thesis [Academic thesis]
Year2017
PublisherTechnical University of Denmark, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 324, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark, compute@compute.dtu.dk
SeriesDTU Compute M.Sc.-2016
NoteDTU supervisor: Christian D. Jensen, cdje@dtu.dk, DTU Compute
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
Publication linkhttp://www.compute.dtu.dk/english
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Computer Science & Engineering