CRYPTOGRAPHERS get ready: the race is on to find the next gold-standard security algorithm.
In 2004 and 2005, Chinese mathematician Xiaoyun Wang shocked cryptographers by revealing flaws in an algorithm crucial to online banking and digital signatures (Â鶹´«Ã½, 26 February 2005, p 4). The Secure Hash Algorithm, SHA-1, turns files of almost any length into a string of bits called a hash. It was believed to be virtually impossible to find two files that produce the same hash, but Wang showed this not to be the case, raising the possibility that hash-protected accounts could be broken into, for…
