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Would a TLS certificate not offer such a large similar prefix? Just change the domain to a wildcard or something like the RapidSSL MD5 attack from a few years back.


In https://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/, Sotirov et al. were able to use the ability to create MD5 collisions to create a pair of colliding certificates because the content of an about-to-be-issued certificate was almost completely predictable. In response to this, the industry added requirements for CAs to include unpredictable values (such as an unpredictable serial number) in certificates. For example, the certificate for HN has serial number 00:EA:21:7C:EA:6C:1F:97:9E:6A:91:90:B7:68:52:D6:63, which is at least in part nonsequential and random, specifically in order to prevent an attacker who knows a collision attack in the hash function used by the CA from being able to exploit it.

This precaution means that an attack like this isn't immediately directly usable against TLS, because the work factor has been increased dramatically.

Edit: the adopted change to the rules is at https://cabforum.org/2016/07/08/ballot-164/ and requires at least 64 bits of CSPRNG entropy in the serial number, specifically as a response to Sotirov. I forgot the history of the section that it replaced (which recommended at least 20 unpredictable bits), but I think that may also have been a response to Sotirov; if the old recommendation had been in use then Sotirov's original attack would not have worked.


Also, they used a chosen-prefix attack for creating colliding certificates.

The SHA-1 attack is identical-prefix, which gives you much less flexibility.


> Just change the domain to a wildcard or something

Or change a CA:FALSE certificate to CA:TRUE, so you have your own intermediate certificate.




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