Can I Create A Hash Collision In An Instance? Well, Yes!

A hash collision is created when we take two different inputs of data, and then create the same hash. One way of doing with is to search for two data elements and add random data in order to find the same hash. With GPUs, and with the MD5 method it is now possible to take two images and eventually create the same hash value for them.

For MD5 we have a hash of 128 bits, and so has 2¹²⁸ different hashes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take too long to create a collision, and where we have different content producing the same hash. Recently, though, Mat McHugh showed that he could produce the same hash signature for different images, using hashclash, and for just 65 cents on the Amazon GPU Cloud, and took just 10 hours to process. He created these two images which generate the same hash signature (Figure 1). If we check the hash signatures we get:

C:\openssl>openssl md5 hash01.jpgMD5(hash01.jpg)= e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338
C:\openssl>openssl md5 hash02.jpgMD5(hash02.jpg)= e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338

Figure 1: Images

But can we find instant collisions? Well, we can if we use a natural collision. For this if we have two data elements of a and b…