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John BLack – Recent Progress in Cryptographic Hashing

I attended John Black's talk on cryptographic hashing, which also turned out to be his tenure talk. The talk briefly covered some of the current issues in cryptographic research particularly focusing on his work on cryptographic hash functions. He spoke in some detail (high level) about the MD5 hash function. He then proceeded to explain possible attacks on MD5, especially the one by Xiaoyun Wang's team. Black then spoke about how his research group worked on clarifying and improving Wang's attack. Improvements include significant speed ups from requiring a supercomputer in 2004 to requiring only a regular PC now.

The over all talk was at a fairly high level. Thus it was a fairly enjoyable talk even for someone like me who does not have too much experience with research in cryptography.


Last modified 9 December 2007 at 2:39 pm by Soumya