[zooko@zooko.com: [Revctrl] colliding md5 hashes of human-meaningful documents]

----- Forwarded message from zooko@zooko.com -----

There is nothing theoretically surprising about this, but hopefully its concreteness and the accompanying scenario will make an impression on people on people. The same technique should work to generate two documents with identical SHA1 hashes.

http://www.cits.rub.de/MD5Collisions/

----- End forwarded message -----

I expected the two postscript files differing in some huge binary blob, but it turns out the binary part is very small (about 256 bytes) and only few (about nine) bytes are different, contrary to how people have predicted the collisions. This is much more close to finding a collision between similar pure C files, I think. Rather unsettling.