2020-01-07 - News - Tony Finch
Happy new (calendar) year!
Our previous news item on DNS delegation updates explained that we are changing the DNSSEC signature algorithm on all UIS zones from RSA-SHA-1 to ECDSA-P256-SHA-256. Among the reasons I gave was that SHA-1 is rather broken.
SHAmbles
Today I learned that SHA-1 is a shambles: a second SHA-1 collision has been constructed, so it is now more accurate to say that SHA-1 is extremely broken.
The new "SHAmbles" collision is vastly more affordable than the 2017 "SHAttered" collision and makes it easier to construct practical attacks.
DNSSEC implications
As well as the UIS zones (which are now mostly off RSA-SHA-1), Maths and the Computer Lab have a number of zones signed with RSA-SHA-1. These should also be upgraded to a safer algorithm. I will be contacting the relevant people directly to co-ordinate this change.
I have written some more detailed notes on the wider implications of SHA-1 chosen prefix collisions and DNSSEC.