Smashing (Crypto) Pumpkins
Meet the Pumpkin Hash: MD6
Well, it’s that time of the year when you can’t avoid pumpkins. So let’s look at a little story about an amazing piece of cryptography that never quite make it into the mainstream: the Pumpkin Hash.
MD2, MD4, and MD5
Ron Rivest is held in possibly the highest of all regards of anyone in cryptography. Overall, he has been cited over 155,480 times, including:
His classic paper was, of course, the RSA method (“A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems”). RSA, in fact, still provides the core of trust on the Internet (and it is likely that your browser is using RSA to prove the identity of most of the sites that you visit). But, he also published a classic paper on the MD5 hashing method. This produced a 128-bit hash value and was (and still is) well-used in many applications. Unfortunately, it is now fairly easy to create a hash collision.
The SHA-3 competition
In 2008, NIST was standardizing the SHA-3 method and looking to find an alternative method to SHA-2 (SHA-256). And, so, all looked good for Ron to…
