Tunnels in Hash Functions: MD5 Collisions Within a Minute

In this paper we introduce a new idea of tunneling of hash functions. In some sense tunnels replace multi-message modification methods and exponentially accelerate collision search. We describe several tunnels in hash function MD5. Using it we find a MD5 collision roughly in one minute on a standard notebook PC (Intel Pentium, 1.6 GHz). The method works for any initializing value. Tunneling is a general idea, which can be used for finding collisions of other hash functions, such as SHA-1, 2. We show several capabilities of tunnels. A program, which source code is available on a project homepage, experimentally verified the method. Version 2 of this paper contains the appendix with the description of more tunnels. These tunnels further decrease the average time of MD5 collision to 31 seconds. On PC Intel Pentium 4 (3,2 GHz) it is 17 seconds in average.