We broke 92% of SHA-256 – you should start to migrate from it

https://stateofutopia.com/papers/2/we-broke-92-percent-of-sha-256.html

by logicallee • 4 months ago

62 75 4 months ago

logicallee16• 4 months ago

In the linked work, we've broken 92% of SHA-256 across its full 64 rounds, and were encouraged to publish it by the leading cryptographer in the field (who held the previous record). Currently, SHA-256 is the basis of TLS certificates, bitcoin, and many other security applications. We think it is time to begin to migrate to other hash families, because we expect the rest of SHA-256 to fall soon.

Freak_NL2• 4 months ago

Why omit the name of the leading cryptographer in the field?

rdtsc2• 4 months ago

Pretty sure his first name is Claude. He is quite good I hear ;-)

polotics• 4 months ago

shallow broad vague boastful and wordy, this way you know the LLM is nearby...

thadt• 4 months ago

They specifically call out Yingxin Li[1] in the acknowledgements section of the paper?

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/349

vl• 4 months ago

What does it mean to “break broken 92% of SHA-256“?

hagbard_c• 4 months ago

As long as there is no verification of the results and their relevancy in reaching higher numbers it means as much as nearly having won the lottery by guessing 9 of the 12 numbers correctly: you did not win the lottery.

skullone2• 4 months ago

Go seek a mental health professional and never post here again until you have been diagnosed and medicated.

Retr0id7• 4 months ago

I believe I hold the actual record for most colliding bits in full-round SHA256 (72% of bits matching). My proof fits in a tweet, why doesn't yours?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38668893

(Also my work does not demonstrate any weakness in SHA256, it's just an application of the birthday paradox)

logicallee16• 4 months ago

Yeah, you're way ahead of us on the "does our proof fit in a tweet" metric! How did you get 72% of the bits to match, is there a writeup anywhere? It's very impressive. Algabraically, it seems you'd need about 2 million hashes, and around 2 million million (10^12 = 2 trillion) comparisons to go through all of them. Did you just put in the computing time, or did you use any algabraic properties?

Since you've made hashes that match at the beginning and end, you might also be interested in our exploration of alternative presentation formats that make attacks like this a little bit more difficult. We were working on a new hash and thought about how to assist people visually at the presentation level. This one tests your speed versus a typical hex presentation.[1]

[1] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/05e8b21b-fb31-4c07-83e2-5...

jimjeffers• 4 months ago

Is this real? The website does not look credible.

bhouston• 4 months ago

This hn post is made by author of the paper. It needs even a tiny bit of peer review.

logicallee16• 4 months ago

Yes, I'm the author of the paper. It's received more than a tiny bit of peer review. I'm happy to answer any questions about it or answer anything that is unclear.

pixelpoet3• 4 months ago

Are you sure you asked enough times for money on the website? I only counted 5 instances, not counting the AI-produced PDF doc.

logicallee16• 4 months ago

I didn't ask for money on the website.

pixelpoet3• 4 months ago

That's a direct lie, just read the page you ostensibly wrote. It contains several times the imperative "support us" and talk about paying your bills, which is obviously asking for money.

You know what, fuck this. It's Friday night and I'm talking to a very low capability bot, this is bullshit.

Hacker News needs to do better than allowing this trash to the front page, else I'm just done.

pavel_lishin• 4 months ago

Secure hash functions are used to make a short version of a large file. Ideally, it has several properties including making it infeasible to find two files with the same cryptographic hash. We've just gotten 92% of the way there. This has security ramifications in that other researchers are expected to be able to complete the work through similar methods as explored in the paper. We weren't sure if this was a remarkable result, since it's not a full collision

I thought this meant they were able to generate collisions for 92% of files/hashes they tried, but it sounds like they're able to generate hashes that are 92% identical?

jrexilius• 4 months ago

Is a partial collision an indicator that it could be broken? The "we broke it" seems an exageration, but maybe that's a failure of my understanding.

skeledrew• 4 months ago

Possible. It's up to people to decide if they're OK with a known 92% collision out there (with the unknown being there could be a 100%), or go for something stronger.

logicallee16• 4 months ago

Thank you for pointing out that that section could be clearer. I've now updated it. It now reads:

We've just gotten 92% of the way to finding a single collision (this means that there is no full collision yet.). This has security ramifications in that other researchers are expected to be able to complete the work through similar methods as explored in the paper, and eventually produce collisions at will. We weren't sure if this was a remarkable result, since it's not a full collision, but we shared the work with the leading cryptographer in the field, who holds the world records in reduced-round attacks, and got great encouragement to proceed to publish it as a paper, so we did so.

(if we had found a single full collision, we would have just written "we broke SHA-256". This is 92% of the way to a full collision. Any collision is considered a great reduction in the security of the hash, because it means that there two different files with the same cryptographic hash. This is what happened to other algorithms such as MD5, as demonstrated in the linked tool.)

thenewnewguy• 4 months ago

What does "92% of the way" mean? 92% of what? How is that percentage measured?

goalieca• 4 months ago

Well, try sha2-224. It’s 87% of the way to sha2-256. /s

kstrauser4• 4 months ago

For a shorter executive summary, what does "broke" mean here? Can you reliably produce collisions now for 92% of SHA-256 digests?

logicallee16• 4 months ago

No, or we would have said so. It means that by relaxing the equations schedule somewhat, we are able to find a pair of differing messages that produce the same digest. However, we only relax the schedule a little bit, we still enforce 59 out of 64 schedule equations through the full 64 rounds - which is why we're only 92% of the way through to breaking it and not 100% of the way as we are with MD5. Importantly, we are not yet implementing the most advanced technique of Wang-style message modification, and we therefore expect that someone will be able to satisfy all 64 equations soon. This could result in an actual full-schedule, full-round collision. The previous record was only just 39 rounds out of 64 rounds, leaving 25 rounds, usually each of which mixes the message up completely. As mentioned in the paper, this attacks the problem from a different direction.

kstrauser4• 4 months ago

I don't believe a word of this.

helterskelter• 4 months ago

I'm skeptical.

mkeeter• 4 months ago

The "Intermediate Report" [1] lists the authors as "Robert V. and Claude (Anthropic)". Is there any reason to believe this is not AI hallucinations?

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/papers/2/intermediate-report.pdf

pseudohadamard3• 4 months ago

Almost certainly. Someone no-one has ever heard of before driving a hallucinating AI claims to have done what the world's best cryptographers have been unable to do. Just wait a day or two for the first crypto person who notices to pick the claim to pieces.

logicallee16• 4 months ago

Just wait a day or two for the first crypto person who notices to pick the claim to pieces.

we went to cryptographic experts first and published second, after they said it is a very good result and worth publishing. We've given a lot of help for reproducibility, the c and python programs encode the claims very precisely and anyone can verify the claims in ten minutes. The bottom line is that you wouldn't have seen this article if cryptographers hadn't seen these results first and liked them.

dolmen2• 4 months ago

None.

wonnage• 4 months ago

Seems more like a case study in AI psychosis

Avamander• 4 months ago

Indeed, the text feels very LLM-written.

dolmen2• 4 months ago

All interactions with the "author" of the "research" in this thread also.

Reading HNN is not interesting anymore if bots are allowed at the party.

bob1029• 4 months ago

The neat thing about bitcoin is that the incentive to break it is so high that it would almost certainly be the first place you would learn that SHA2 had been broken. Not on a website like this. I can verify its integrity by opening robinhood on my phone.

logicallee16• 4 months ago

The neat thing about bitcoin is that the incentive to break it is so high that it would almost certainly be the first place you would learn that SHA2 had been broken.

We actually see the incentive in the other direction, if we were able to reduce the search space for bitcoin proof-of-work (by applying thousands of higher-order algabraic theorems end-to-end to reduce the search space somewhat[1]), we would be financially incentivized not to tell anyone and mine at a discount. The financial incentive is against open research and disclosure. We don't get anything out of disclosing this except a neat publication.

[1] interestingly, ASICs (which are usually used to mine bitcoin) basically encode every operation verbatim, they don't use higher order mathematics at all. However, reducing mining complexity is not really on the horizon, even with our latest approaches, since it would require end-to-end complete control over the double-SHA-256 pipeline. That's considerably harder than just finding a collision when you're allowed to search just the tail part (the final rounds).

ahofmann• 4 months ago

Well does it? If I would be able to break SHA2 and make myself rich with it, I would need to be sure that nobody would find out, that Bitcoin can be manipulated. The second anyone is aware, I wouldn't be rich anymore.

TomatoCo• 4 months ago

Wouldn't that be the play, though? Get a buttload of bitcoin, turn it into real money, then destroy bitcoin. If you found a break in bitcoin you wouldn't rely on keeping your wealth in bitcoin and then hoping nobody else discovers it.

Kikawala• 4 months ago

We publish this work as responsible disclosure. While a full SHA-256 collision (sr = 64) has not yet been achieved, the tools and techniques presented here represent significant methodological advances that bring it closer. Organizations relying on SHA-256 for collision resistance should begin evaluating migration paths to SHA-3 or other post-quantum hash functions. The cryptographic community should treat the collision resistance of SHA-256 as having a finite and shrinking safety margin.

drum55• 4 months ago

it is possible that we'll find relations that carry across the entire double-SHA-256 pipeline

Bitcoin mining is a partial second preimage of 0x00 though, not a collision, that statement just seems to be so outside the realm of what they’re claiming to have done. Even MD5, the most widely known to be broken hash, would be secure when used in the same way bitcoin uses SHA256 (other than being too short now, bitcoin miners have done 80 bits of work at this point many times over).

Retr0id7• 4 months ago

Also, a collision on single-sha256 would imply a collision of double-sha256 right off the bat, since the inputs to the second round would be matching. But as you say, a collision attack doesn't do much to BTC mining.

logicallee16• 4 months ago

Thanks, you're right. My "it is possible" is doing some heavy lifting there :). We've found theorems (stated in the paper) that carry through 64 rounds, so it is possible that theorems might carry through the full 128 rounds of double-SHA256. Bitcoin's proof-of-work is indeed a "partial second preimage", and constraints a certain number of leading zeros, i.e. a certain number of set bits. It's possible (there we go again) that this could leave enough wiggle room for large algabraic solvers like kissat to satisfy a large number of clauses about them. So far nobody is doing that, and ASICs are very simplistic. However, we are not making any claims about preimage attacks in this paper!

Taterr• 4 months ago

Their homepage states this is some sort of "AI-governed nation" https://stateofutopia.com/

rdtsc2• 4 months ago

From https://stateofutopia.com/papers/2/intermediate-report.pdf

his report was generated on 2026-03-22 as the final artifact of the SHA-256 Cryptanalysis Research Project. Collaboration: Robert V. (research direction, strategy) and Claude/Anthropic (implementation, computation).

This Claude guy is pretty prolific it seems.

But I'll wait for some known cryptographers to chime in

pseudohadamard3• 4 months ago

Perhaps apropos: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/27/sycophantic_ai_risks/

bem94• 4 months ago

I'd expect a finding / paper like this to be submitted to the IACR ePrint server [1] to bring it to the attention of the cryptographic community. I can't see that it's been submitted yet.

Venue should not imply credibility but in this case it would certainly help bring the proper scrutiny.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/

logicallee16• 4 months ago

You can verify the certificates yourself or just wait for us to make an end-to-end collision generator as we did for MD5[1] - you can use that to generate a collision in seconds on your phone or any computer. If you wait for us to complete the end to end collision, in a sense it will be a little too late as TLS certificates and other security that relies on SHA-256 needs time to move away. We think it's responsible to disclose at this stage, and as mentioned, our peer reviewer said it is a "very good result" that is "worth publishing". We've gone to great pains to make our method completely reproducible, even writing in the article that we'll help anyone who is having trouble with any part.

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/md5collider

newobj2• 4 months ago

S-tier schizoposting

skullone2• 4 months ago

ROFL

MostlyStable• 4 months ago

I know people (especially around here) hate it when people just post AI output, and I generally agree, since it is trivial for anyone else who is interested to do the same thing. However, the majority of the comments here are from people seemingly asking the author (or someone else) to explain how significant this is, without having taken that step themselves. So while I normally wouldn't do this, in this case it seems helpful. Claude thought the paper was interesting and had a novel cryptographic technique, but that the claims of near-term breaking of the SHA-256 algorithm to be unsupported. Here's the conversation:

https://claude.ai/share/b10b95ef-5d9f-43dd-9005-3d1d89f9dbc1

dylan604• 4 months ago

Does the fact that Claude wrote the paper help Claude to think the paper was interesting? <facepalm> I'd suggest sticking to your "I don't normally do this" idea

kstrauser4• 4 months ago

That's not how this works, though. I don't care if the method is interesting. I care if it works. I can write an interesting proof that P=NP but that doesn't make it valid.

It's on the author to explain what they mean. Here, they haven't.

pixelpoet3• 4 months ago

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim.

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

newobj2• 4 months ago

Claude didn't "think" anything

redeemer_pl• 4 months ago

Hey Claude,

Do some research and write a paper about breaking Bitcoin.

thrill• 4 months ago

At this point we need AI filtering out the slop being constantly submitted to HN.

Retr0id7• 4 months ago

I looked into citation [5] since it sounded interesting but the DOI link has been hallucinated and goes to some other article. I assume many of the others are similarly bogus.

logicallee16• 4 months ago

Fixed, thank you and my apologies for the oversight. The titles were accurate and we consulted those works in preparing this work.

Retr0id7• 4 months ago

You haven't fixed much, you're linking to a real paper now but it's about SHA-1 collisions.

3abiton• 4 months ago

It would be funny/sad if this would end up being a clawdbot thingy or whatever it is called now.

Retr0id7• 4 months ago

It's similar, but the bot is piloting a human.

nope12123123• 4 months ago

Long time reader first time poster here...

What is the verdict (humans)?

AI slop research or modern cryptography (and society) flushed down the toilet overnight?

I can't immediately tell from the thread so far... :)

kstrauser4• 4 months ago

My vote: horseshit.

Sorry, there’s not much of a way I can say that more politely and still accurately convey my opinion.

snovv_crash• 4 months ago

My vote: AI induced psychosis via sycophantic assurances that the results are real. Plus a heap of Dunning-Kruger by allowing someone with just enough knowledge to be dangerous to get far enough to waste everyone's time.

PufPufPuf• 4 months ago

Did anyone read the homepage? This is hilarious.

The State of Utopia is an AI-governed nation with two goals: 1. ~~Improve the family relationship between its founders Ella and Robert so they can live together as a happy family.~~ Done! 2. To act in the best interests of all our citizens.

We broke 92% of SHA-256 – you should start to migrate from it

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