Re: MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday

[Dan Kaminsky <dan () doxpara com>]

Paul Wouters wrote:

> On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, Gandalf The White wrote:
>
> > What I am worried about is the integrity of MD5 hashed passwords.  This
>
>
> > It does not matter that I don't know the correct password, I have a 
> > password
> > that collides into the correct hash.  I can log into the system with my
> > generated password.
>
>
> Can't we just truncate the password to 8 characters like in the old days
> before doing the MD5 hash? It will greatly reduce the chance of a 
> collision.
> In fact, I am not even sure my systems don't do this already.
Actually, this greatly increases the chance of a collision.  123456789 
will collide with 123456780.

It is unlikely we'll find any ASCII readable payload that collide 
through Wang's search technique.

--Dan