oss-sec mailing list archives
Re: CVE Request: MD5 used for Download verification
From: Jeremy Stanley <fungi () yuggoth org>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:03:26 +0000
On 2013-03-11 15:32:52 -0400 (-0400), Donald Stufft wrote: [...]
Setuptools (and it's fork distribute) utilize MD5 in order to verify that a download has not been tampered with.
[...] While I'll be the first to agree that migrating to a more widely accepted modern hashing scheme is a noble goal, I'm unconvinced you present a security vulnerability in these tools' use of MD5. 1. Do the authors indicate in their documentation that this is intended to protect against malicious actors altering data in transit (a la MitM), and not just to identify corrupted downloads? 2. These tools are retrieving the checksums and files being checksummed from the same location in many (most?) cases, right? 3. Can you come up with a reasonable case in which a collision attack on MD5 would actually allow for maliciousness in this case (note most common scenarios would require a preimage or second preimage attack on MD5 instead, which still has yet to be demonstrated)? -- { PGP( 48F9961143495829 ); FINGER( fungi () cthulhu yuggoth org ); WWW( http://fungi.yuggoth.org/ ); IRC( fungi () irc yuggoth org#ccl ); WHOIS( STANL3-ARIN ); MUD( kinrui () katarsis mudpy org:6669 ); }
Current thread:
- CVE Request: MD5 used for Download verification Donald Stufft (Mar 11)
- Re: CVE Request: MD5 used for Download verification Jeremy Stanley (Mar 11)