Re^5: MD5 - what's the alternative

[beable]

That's something else I was wondering about. Where is the attacker supposedly snooping that they can capture an MD5'd password? Why doesn't the attacker just snoop to capture the plaintext password instead? This "vulnerability" is very light on details.

[BrowserUk]

I agree. Very light. All the description I've read say is that they have found a way of finding or generation collisions. So what? We always knew there were collisions.

The only "evidence", shows two pre-calculated datasets that produce the same md5. What I haven't seen (though maybe the conference gave more detail than I can find), is any technique for generating the plaintext from the md5?

If the mechanism starts with the original plaintext, to generate another plaintext with the same md5--why are they bothering? They already have the original!

Hmmm. Maybe there is some real information out there somewhere.