<story><title>The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1</title><url>https://sha-mbles.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tambourine_man</author><text>This kind of thing always brings me down a bit. It&amp;#x27;s not rational, but it does.&lt;p&gt;I mean I truly admire these folks skills, the math involved is obviously remarkable.&lt;p&gt;But I think the feeling is related to not being able to rely on anything in our field. Hard to justify going to the trouble of encrypting your backup. 10 years from now, it might be as good as plain text.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not security only, nothing seems to work in the long term. 
Imagine an engineer receiving a call at midnight about his bridge because gravity changed during daylight saving in a leap year. That&amp;#x27;s our field.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WorldMaker</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s an MC Frontalot song called &amp;quot;Secrets from the Future&amp;quot; and the refrain is &amp;quot;You can&amp;#x27;t hide secrets from the future.&amp;quot; It&amp;#x27;s something of a useful mantra to remind oneself that if &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot; is a part of your threat model, yes your encryption likely isn&amp;#x27;t enough because on a long enough timescale it is likely &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot; will crack it.&lt;p&gt;As with any other security issue, the question is &amp;quot;what is your threat model?&amp;quot; You can still justify encrypting your backup today if your threat model includes today&amp;#x27;s actors, however much you worry about &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 10 years from now, it might be as good as plain text.&lt;p&gt;Or 10 years from now it might be the next Linear A tablets to confuse cryptoarcheologists, unreadable and untranslatable and entirely foreign. If &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot; is in your threat model, don&amp;#x27;t forget the other fun forms of entropy beyond encryption being cracked such as encodings changing, file formats falling out of service&amp;#x2F;compatibility, &amp;quot;common knowledge&amp;quot; about slang or memes lost to the ages leaving things indecipherable, and so on and so forth. Most of those things are probably unlikely on only a 10 year time horizon, but you never can tell with &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1</title><url>https://sha-mbles.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tambourine_man</author><text>This kind of thing always brings me down a bit. It&amp;#x27;s not rational, but it does.&lt;p&gt;I mean I truly admire these folks skills, the math involved is obviously remarkable.&lt;p&gt;But I think the feeling is related to not being able to rely on anything in our field. Hard to justify going to the trouble of encrypting your backup. 10 years from now, it might be as good as plain text.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not security only, nothing seems to work in the long term. 
Imagine an engineer receiving a call at midnight about his bridge because gravity changed during daylight saving in a leap year. That&amp;#x27;s our field.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baddox</author><text>&amp;gt; Hard to justify going to the trouble of encrypting your backup. 10 years from now, it might be as good as plain text.&lt;p&gt;When has that happened? Public key cryptography and symmetric key cryptography are still doing fine as far as I&amp;#x27;m aware, and the latter doesn&amp;#x27;t even seem to be vulnerable to quantum computing.&lt;p&gt;Moreover, SHA-1 has been considered insecure for, what, at least 10 years? The fact that a cryptographic hash function has been widely considered insecure and widely recommended for deprecation a decade before a proof of concept even emerges is, to me, something to feel very good about.</text></comment>