Security team successfully cracks SSL using 200 PS3's and MD5

Sun Jan 4 22:52:10 UTC 2009

On Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:58:34 CST, Joe Greco said:

> > Technically the only thing necessary to prevent  
> > this attack has already been done, and that is to stop issuing certs  
> > signed with MD5 so that no one else can create a rogue CA via this  
> > means.
>  
> Are we certain that existing certs cannot be subverted?

The attack depends on being able to to jigger up *two* certs that have the
same MD5 hash.  Therefor, attacking an existing cert would require either:

1) That the existing cert be one of a pair (in other words, somebody else
already knew about the current attack and also did it).

or

2) Somebody has found a way to cause a collision to a specified MD5 hash (which
is still impractical, AFAIK).

If anybody has a subvertible cert, it's pretty safe to guess that they *know*
they have such a cert, because they themselves *built* the cert that way.
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