Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Thanks for spelling it out so nicely. I was having a bit of trouble coming up with the scenario too.

And as for the "collisions are unreasonable to expect people to generate", remember the use case: these are going to be extremely long-lived hashes.

With the cache poisoning, once you find a collision against jQuery 2.1.1 (to beat the example horse), you can continue to use that against all requests for jQuery 2.1.1. And we know how wide-applicable targets of cryptographic opportunity typically fair against adversaries with substantial brute-force processing resources...



Once SHA-2 is broken, browsers can simply no longer treat those hashes as safe. The spec suggests browsers don't use anything less than SHA384, including MD5.

The impact of SHA-2 failing would be far, far, larger than poisoning jQuery.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: