Cyber Risks · Trail of Bits Blog

Analyzing the MD5 collision in Flame

Summary: The Flame malware used an MD5 collision attack to infect new machines through Windows Update, marking the first such attack discovered in the wild. Trail of Bits, whose co-founder Alex Sotirov was part of the 2008 academic collaboration that first demonstrated the practicality of this class of attacks, presented preliminary findings on June 9th at the SummerCon conference in New York.

What you should know: A collision attack against MD5 was long treated as an academic concern until Flame used it to push malware through Windows Update itself, so any system still trusting MD5 for integrity or trust decisions is relying on a primitive that has now been broken in live operations.

Read the original at Trail of Bits Blog ↗

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Zero-Days & Exploits
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