Generic collision attacks on hash-functions

Chris Mitchell, Royal Holloway, University of London

Friday April 20th, 2007. Room and Time TBA.

Abstract:

Over the last two or three years that has been a huge amount of interest in
hash-function specific collision attacks.  In this talk we will consider a
slightly different problem, namely the difficulty of finding a collision for
an arbitrary hash-function, i.e. using methods which work regardless of how
the internals of the hash-function are designed.  The results suggest that
finding collisions for hash-functions may be slightly easier than was
previously believed.