From: Tim Dierks <tim@dierks.org>
Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 18:57:43 +0800
To: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Rumor: DSS Broken?
Message-ID: <v02140b00adc474aeab54@[206.170.39.104]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 6:41 PM 5/18/96, Bill Stewart wrote:
>>I was talking to someone who was talking to someone (have I said this is a
>>rumor yet?) who was solicited for comment by a Very Famous Reporter about
>>the fact that  DSS, the Digital Signature Standard, promulgated by NIST, I
>>believe, had been broken.
>
>MD5 is at least weakened, maybe broken; there's an abstract by Hans Dobbertin
>that says something about generating collisions, and gives an example

DSS uses SHA, which isn't affected by the Dobbertin finding. I believe that
you would have to solve the discrete logarithm problem to break DSS; this
would imply being able to break Diffie-Hellman and a number of other crypto
algorithms. (However, I'm not certain that it's been shown that breaking
DSS is equivalent to breaking discrete logarithms.)

 - Tim

Tim Dierks - Software Haruspex - tim@dierks.org

"That's the trouble with technology. It attracts people who have nothing
to say." - Muffey Kibbey, mother [Wall Street Journal, May 10 1996]