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No, that's not the big problem. Every collision of this kind so far just requires a random looking section, and allows another section to be whatever you want. You can just swap out one file for malware.


Ah, sorry. I got confused by this section on shattered.it, which seemed to be saying that merely requiring a certain level of entropy in the resulting documents would be enough to mitigate the attack:

> Are TLS/SSL certificates at risk? [...] it is required that certificate authorities insert at least 20 bits of randomness inside the serial number field. If properly implemented this helps preventing a practical exploitation.

After giving it a bit more thought though, I realize now though that this mitigation actually works by preventing the attacker from fully controlling the hash of the first, non-malicious document.


The project's site is referring to an outdated version of the requirement. As I noted above, the requirement they refer to is only a SHOULD (some CAs might not have complied with it) and was replaced at the end of September with a SHALL which requires 64 bits rather than 20.

https://cabforum.org/2016/07/08/ballot-164/

Edit: I told them about this and they've fixed it; it now says "64 bits" instead of "20 bits".


CA certs are different than the general case.


This attack requires both to be, in some sense, "random looking". i.e. you can't generate a collision for an arbitrary first text.




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