Marc Stevens (cryptology)

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Marc Stevens
Born (1981-04-07) April 7, 1981 (age 43) [1]
Other namesMarc Martinus Jacobus Stevens
Alma mater
Known for Cryptography
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science
Theses
Academic advisors

Dr. ir. Marc Stevens is a cryptology researcher most known for his work on cryptographic hash collisions and for the creation of the chosen-prefix hash collision tool HashClash as part of his master's degree thesis. [2] He first gained international attention for his work with Alexander Sotirov, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, and Benne de Weger in creating a rogue SSL certificate which was presented in 2008 during the 25th annual Chaos Communication Congress warning of the dangers of using the MD5 hash function in issuing SSL certificates. [3] Several years later in 2012, according to Microsoft, the authors of the Flame malware used similar methodology to that which the researchers warned of by initiating an MD5 collision to forge a Windows code-signing certificate. [4] Marc was most recently awarded the Google Security Privacy and Anti-abuse applied award. Google selected Stevens for this award in recognition of his work in Cryptanalysis, in particular related to the SHA-1 hash function. [5]

In February 2017, the first known successful SHA-1 collision attack in practice (termed "SHAttered") was recognized. Marc Stevens was first-credited in the subsequent paper [6] along with CWI Amsterdam colleague Pierre Karpman, and researchers Elie Bursztein, Ange Albertini, Yarik Markov, Alex Petit Bianco, Clement Baisse [7] from Google.

Marc is currently employed as a Cryptology Researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HMAC</span> Computer communications hash algorithm

In cryptography, an HMAC is a specific type of message authentication code (MAC) involving a cryptographic hash function and a secret cryptographic key. As with any MAC, it may be used to simultaneously verify both the data integrity and authenticity of a message. An HMAC is a type of keyed hash function that can also be used in a key derivation scheme or a key stretching scheme.

The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4, and was specified in 1992 as RFC 1321.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RIPEMD</span> Cryptographic hash function

RIPEMD is a family of cryptographic hash functions developed in 1992 and 1996. There are five functions in the family: RIPEMD, RIPEMD-128, RIPEMD-160, RIPEMD-256, and RIPEMD-320, of which RIPEMD-160 is the most common.

In cryptography, SHA-1 is a hash function which takes an input and produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest – typically rendered as 40 hexadecimal digits. It was designed by the United States National Security Agency, and is a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard. The algorithm has been cryptographically broken but is still widely used.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securing HTTPS remains the most publicly visible.

In cryptography, X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates. X.509 certificates are used in many Internet protocols, including TLS/SSL, which is the basis for HTTPS, the secure protocol for browsing the web. They are also used in offline applications, like electronic signatures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptographic hash function</span> Hash function that is suitable for use in cryptography

A cryptographic hash function (CHF) is a hash algorithm that has special properties desirable for a cryptographic application:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MD4</span> Cryptographic hash function

The MD4 Message-Digest Algorithm is a cryptographic hash function developed by Ronald Rivest in 1990. The digest length is 128 bits. The algorithm has influenced later designs, such as the MD5, SHA-1 and RIPEMD algorithms. The initialism "MD" stands for "Message Digest".

The Secure Hash Algorithms are a family of cryptographic hash functions published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), including:

In cryptography, a collision attack on a cryptographic hash tries to find two inputs producing the same hash value, i.e. a hash collision. This is in contrast to a preimage attack where a specific target hash value is specified.

The MD2 Message-Digest Algorithm is a cryptographic hash function developed by Ronald Rivest in 1989. The algorithm is optimized for 8-bit computers. MD2 is specified in IETF RFC 1319. The "MD" in MD2 stands for "Message Digest".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digest access authentication</span> Method of negotiating credentials between web server and browser

Digest access authentication is one of the agreed-upon methods a web server can use to negotiate credentials, such as username or password, with a user's web browser. This can be used to confirm the identity of a user before sending sensitive information, such as online banking transaction history. It applies a hash function to the username and password before sending them over the network. In contrast, basic access authentication uses the easily reversible Base64 encoding instead of hashing, making it non-secure unless used in conjunction with TLS.

SHA-2 is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compression function itself built using the Davies–Meyer structure from a specialized block cipher.

FORK-256 is a hash algorithm designed in response to security issues discovered in the earlier SHA-1 and MD5 algorithms. After substantial cryptanalysis, the algorithm is considered broken.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Merkle–Damgård construction</span> Method of building collision-resistant cryptographic hash functions

In cryptography, the Merkle–Damgård construction or Merkle–Damgård hash function is a method of building collision-resistant cryptographic hash functions from collision-resistant one-way compression functions. This construction was used in the design of many popular hash algorithms such as MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-2.

Ivan Bjerre Damgård is a Danish cryptographer and currently a professor at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HashClash</span> BOINC based volunteer computing project

HashClash was a volunteer computing project running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software platform to find collisions in the MD5 hash algorithm. It was based at Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and Marc Stevens initiated the project as part of his master's degree thesis.

SHA-3 is the latest member of the Secure Hash Algorithm family of standards, released by NIST on August 5, 2015. Although part of the same series of standards, SHA-3 is internally different from the MD5-like structure of SHA-1 and SHA-2.

This article summarizes publicly known attacks against cryptographic hash functions. Note that not all entries may be up to date. For a summary of other hash function parameters, see comparison of cryptographic hash functions.

Flame, also known as Flamer, sKyWIper, and Skywiper, is modular computer malware discovered in 2012 that attacks computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. The program is used for targeted cyber espionage in Middle Eastern countries.

References

  1. https://marc-stevens.nl/research/cv.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  2. "HashClash".
  3. "MD5 considered harmful today".
  4. "Flame Malware Collision Explained". 2012-06-06.
  5. "Cryptology researcher Marc Stevens awarded with Google research prize".
  6. https://shattered.io/static/shattered.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  7. "Announcing the first SHA1 collision".
  8. "CWI Cryptology Research Group".