The first big distributed computing effort aimed at definitively cracking SHA-1, one of the most widely used forms of encryption, was opened to public participation in Europe this week.
Run by researchers at Graz University of Technology in Austria, the project aims to tap the computing power of thousands or tens of thousands of individuals, looking for a weakness in the security standard predicted by earlier theoretical work.
Confirming a flaw in the SHA-1 hash function, which is widely used in applications such as email and secure Web browsing, wouldn't be welcome news for the Internet community. But it wouldn't come as a surprise – theoretical work by Chinese cryptographer Xiaoyun Wang two years ago already described an attack on the security standard, leading to calls for its replacement.
Speaking at the Chaos Communications Camp in Germany, Graz researcher Christian Rechberger outlined his group's approach, which he called "inspired by," but developed separately from Wang's work.
Hash functions like SHA-1, which was published by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1995, essentially take a message and run it repeatedly through a set of mathematical transformations producing an ideally unique string of digits as output.
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