[denton-scratch]

> only broken for encryption

It's broken in an adversarial situation: given the hash of evidence-file A, it's possible to construct a file B that gives the same hash.

But it would be a different matter entirely to construct a file B that actually looked like a file of evidence relevant to the case. I don't know how lawyers use these hashes, but unless they're being used to detect malicious tampering, I don't see what's wrong with MD5. And since the files to be hashed are evidence, they're in the custody of a court; things have got quite bad if court officials might be tampering with evidence.

[aljarry]

> It's broken in an adversarial situation: given the hash of evidence-file A, it's possible to construct a file B that gives the same hash.

No, that's a second preimage attack. MD5 is safe against preimage & second preimage attacks.

What MD5 is not safe against, is a collision attack: you can create two messages/files with different content, that end up having the same hash.

[denton-scratch]

Yeah, sorry. TFA made that clear.

So to exploit the vulnerability, you have to be able to manipulate file A, the original piece of evidence, to construct a file B that has a matching hash. I still fail to see how this impacts files submitted to a court in evidence.