MD5 - Not as safe as once believed

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Originally posted here by gore
That's more of an opinion isn't it?

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I tink I'll go with whatever the standard is ;) Not that I don't appreciate your opinions :)

Just as a side-note... how the hell does it make a difference what people think of people? First off whatever has been said in this thread were merely ideas and thoughts based on what started out as a speculation about MD5 and what's better to use for the future... since when can that be a reason for evaluating whatever gore, Striek, myself or whoever else actually knows about the topic of cryptography?

Admittedly Striek's comment about hashing and encryption was a bit vague... but holy f!ck people! :D

Yeah, it was too vague. I never intendended it to start something like this.

Sorry about that.

Hrmmm... feet don't tase so good when you put them in your mouth.

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Originally posted here by chsh
I think you are failing to recognize the actual scope of the issue.

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Hey, you're way out of line kid. Let's get some cold ****ing fizzy water on your head.
Why don't you go read the DOD-STD-5200.28 on encryption, then come back and tell thehorse how to do his job.

I've said it once and I will say it again, I welcome people to disagree with me especially when they provide reasons. Isn't that the point of a forum? As chsh has noted, I'm a big boy and I'm certainly capable of backing up my opinions. His style of responses and those similar never cost me a second of sleep. I'm comfortable with my level of knowledge and I never ever become defensive when someone challenges it.

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Originally posted here by !mitationRust
Hey, you're way out of line kid. Let's get some cold ****ing fizzy water on your head.
Why don't you go read the DOD-STD-5200.28 on encryption, then come back and tell thehorse how to do his job.

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Err, don't tell me YOU don't know the difference between hashing and encryption too! I'm beginning to think it's an epidemic.

EDIT: Even aside from the above, all I could find for various terms was "DOD-STD-5200.28 DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE TRUSTED COMPUTER SYSTEM EVALUATION CRITERIA" located at: http://jcs.mil/htdocs/teinfo/software/did27.html which oddly enough does not mention encryption at all.

Perhaps you could link me directly, since I am apparently but a child and incapable of researching something that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

P.S: Since you evidently haven't gotten past a grade 8 reading level yet, I wasn't telling TH how to do his job, in fact, if you read the thread nowhere do I tell him he is wrong, I simply disagree with him on the scope of the issue, and his examples thereof.

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Originally posted here by chsh

EDIT: Even aside from the above, all I could find for various terms was "DOD-STD-5200.28 DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE TRUSTED COMPUTER SYSTEM EVALUATION CRITERIA" located at: http://jcs.mil/htdocs/teinfo/software/did27.html which oddly enough does not mention encryption at all.

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Where the hell did you get that from, it's mentioned six times. If some could only read, some would know encryption has nothing to do with system security.
If you could read past the first couple pages that would help also. All you read was the table of contents! Like thehorse said, objectivity is the point of the forum. But what I've read from you in the past, it's safe to take catch's suggestion. Your mind is already made up, not to mention it's functioning in a closed-loop type manner.

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LMAO! Thanks for the sig material man!

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Yeah, I found some sig material aswell.

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~catch
Ah chsh back trolling again...

The reason I ignored your questions was because I'd already answered them and to be honest, I really have better things to do with my spare time then to educate the likes of you. That is people who have already made up their mind and just wish to fight and post so much **** that it isn't practical for me to take the time to respond to every little piece.

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He was right.

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Originally posted here by !mitationRust
Where the hell did you get that from, it's mentioned six times.

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Oddly enough, I read "more than the table of contents", encryption itself does not come up at all, merely data protection methods. Feel free to quote relevant bits.

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If some could only read, some would know encryption has nothing to do with system security.

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Funny thing is, you're going off on a tangent completely irrelevant to this thread, which I also pointed out and you continued to ignore.

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If you could read past the first couple pages that would help also. All you read was the table of contents!

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:rolleyes:

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Like thehorse said, objectivity is the point of the forum. But what I've read from you in the past, it's safe to take catch's suggestion.

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Of course it is, why let facts be such a bother when you can easily sidestep them and just flame the poster for saying something they didn't? I love that you brought up catch as an example, because frankly if you read EVERY thread we've debated in, he always runs away for "time away" or "work for a couple of weeks". He disappears when the facts stack up against him, rather convenient I might add. Hey, if you want to quote the best troll AO's had in recent memory, feel free.

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Your mind is already made up, not to mention it's functioning in a closed-loop type manner.

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Funny you say that given I already asked you to point me to a better source. I'm still waiting to see the pertinent section of said documentation. That you have avoided producing it is entirely catch-like behaviour. No wonder you like the guy so much.

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Funny thing is, you're going off on a tangent completely irrelevant to this thread, which I also pointed out and you continued to ignore.

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Pretty much everything posted here in the last two days has been irrelevant to the original topic of this thread. This thread was originally posted to debate the continued usefulness of MD5 as a hashing algorithm.

All opinions aside, I can only see one post on the page here which actaully says anything on the matter. This thread has turned an otherwise useful debate into an ego-bashing festival. It has served its purpose.

I for one am asking a mod to close this thread, as it is no longer contributing in a useful manner to this forum.

Before closing this thread, I'd like to take a stab at moving it back to what it was about. Keep in mind everyone that people can choose to contribute or not contribute any thread. They can also choose to decide what they want to contribute. I'll leave that to you to figure out..

That said, I have some questions for my own personal clarification:

!matationRust: The Orange Book Classification (aka DOD-STD-5200.28 DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE TRUSTED COMPUTER SYSTEM EVALUATION CRITERIA) doesn't seem to indicate any reference to encryption. I always understood that it dealt with Access Controls specifically and the levels or types of Access Controls (MAC, DAC, etc.). Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point as to where it refers to it. The only thing that I could find that was close was the question of integrity of a system. Is this what you were referring to? This does lead to my next question

To all: Since MD5 is now "crackable", and thus now becomes a questionable encryption tool for usage in integrity situations, what are viable, publically available tools that can be used? And how long before the general public is aware of this? Many linuxes suggest the use of MD5 (because it's "more secure") for shadow passwords.

Are we going to see AES or others being "pushed" more now as alternatives? What about sites that use the MD5 hash as a verification of their product (which is pretty much commonplace for any Open Source project)? Is there in existence -- to anyone's knowledge -- any alternatives to tools like MD5sum? Are there projects that deal with this yet?

This is what it boils down to: we know that MD5 is now "useless". So what are we going to do as alternatives?

MD5 being cracked shouldn't really come as a surprise. It happens with all forms of encryption (or hash algorithms) sooner or later; this is why we're not using MD4 anymore.

It should not pose a huge problem to anyone. Any security policy should cover what to do when your existing methods become useless. A plan should be in place for just such an occasion, because it *will* happen.

Many Open Source sites use MD5 as a verification tool, yes. However, the more constientious sites (kernel.org and kde.org come to mind) also sign those hash lists. Although theoretically, one could calculate the MD5 of a given file and replace it with a trojan (not yet, but it's coming soon), one could not yet sign that hash file with the proper key. As such, timestamping these hash lists by a trusted third party could serve as a temporary solution. This however requires the public to routinely check the timestamp and verify it with the release date, which might not happen as often as we'd like.

A more permanent solution would be to do the same thing we always do when the current encryption techniques become useless. Move to a better algorithm. Currently, the best alternative is SHA-1, since it is also included as part of the coreutils package and is therefore available on most every system that already has MD5 algorithms available.

So if MD5 being cracked is the end of the world for you, maybe you shouldn't be working in a field that required it.