The SHA-1 encryption, now widely used for most cryptology applications, has been broken by a faster method, with research done by Xiaoyun Wang, Andrew Yao and Frances Yao. The new method can crack the encryption in 2⁶³, just slightly better than their previous effort of 2⁶⁹, and better than the brute force method of 2⁸⁰. The researches said that over the coming month they will revise their work to possbily improve it.

I’m still surprised that most things (including the US govenment and SSL) still use SHA-1, and haven’t moved onto a variant of SHA-2 (eg: SHA-384, SHA-512, etc.).