Google researchers have managed achieve a collision attack for SHA-1, creating two PDF files with the same signature. The weakness of SHA-1 has been known about for some time but this demonstrates that the algorithm’s use for security-sensitive functions should be discontinued as soon as possible. There are more details on Google’s blog here. IT security experts from Venafi and Rapid7 commented below.
Kevin Bocek, Chief Cybersecurity Strategist at Venafi:
In November our research found that 35% of organisations were still using SHA-1 certificates. In the light of this news, they might as well put up a welcome sign for hackers that says, ‘We don’t care about the security of our applications, data, and customers’. Worryingly, the average organisation has over 23,000 keys and certificates and most lack the tools or visibility to find all the ones using SHA-1 in their environment. And over two thirds of these are unknown until security teams go hunting. We are already past the SHA-1 deprecation deadline and the longer the problem goes unaddressed, the greater the potential damage that SHA-1 could cause.”
Tod Beardsley, Director of Research at Rapid7:
However, I’m not quite ready to panic over this finding just yet. We’ve known that SHA-1 has been on a death watch for years; Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla have all banded together to stamp out SHA-1 hashed SSL certificates for websites, and it’s rare to run into one today. I do worry a little about non-browser implementations of SSL/TLS (such as those used by IoT devices to talk to each other and cloud hosted APIs), but the attack surface here is significantly smaller than, say, the Heartbleed vulnerabilities when those were announced.”
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