When hashes collide

Abstract

Different issues raised due to problems associated with the SHA-1 hash function and its ancestor, MD5 are discussed. MD5 is known to have security problems and it need to be replaced as a hash function in security protocols. The SHA-1 algorithm is not quite strong and it takes 269 steps to find a collision instead of the expected 280 steps. An alternative to SHA-1 is RIPEMD-160, which improves the design by using two parallel data paths that must both be broken to compromise the overall hash function.